Upgrades sometimes flawed

[Bob Jonkman]

On 27 Jan 2009 at 10:02 Andrew Mathenge <ubuntu-ca at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote
about "Re: Upgrades sometimes flawed[...]"

>Perhaps it's time to re-think that six-month release cycle policy.
>Would nine-months help bring in a tighter upgrade with fewer defects?
>
>Andrew.


I don't think so.  Six months is good.  

A longer release cycle means that broken stuff in today's kernel may be 
tightened up more that it would be with a shorter release cycle, but it means 
that we have to wait longer for the broken stuff to be fixed.  Also, the pace 
of change is so great that new stuff would be coming out faster than the 
release cycle. eg. Where were Netbooks nine months ago?

There's an argument for upgrading even more frequently - a continuous upgrade / 
improvement cycle.  This is what the "unstable" branches can be used for.  But 
while upgrading continuously may shorten the time to fix one particular error, 
it gives no opportunity for regression testing.  One bug fix may adversely 
affect an otherwise perfectly functional application.

For those people who don't want to participate in the short upgrade cycle 
Ubuntu offers the LTS releases  (8.04 "Hardy Heron" is the most recent) with 
three years of support (five on the server distro).  LTS releases seem to come 
out every two years or so; 10.04 is next: 
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/ubuntu/release-cycle

Remember that Ubuntu is based on the Debian distro, which is one of the slowest 
to release new versions.  If Ubuntu LTS is still too unstable, people may want 
to consider using a Debian release instead.

It's always possible to upgrade piecemeal - if there's a new feature or 
application you want then just install that one by itself, without upgrading 
the entire OS.

The bottom line is that people shouldn't feel forced to upgrade just because 
there's a new release.  The whole point of Software Freedom is the freedom to 
do what's best for YOU.  


It looks like this has been a topic of discussion for a long time:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-July/004777.html


--Bob.

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