request for review of Ubuntu 9.04 RC announcement

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 09:36:38AM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:13:49PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > So part of the premise for the releases.u.c/cdimage.u.c split is that the
> > high-profile, heavy-traffic images are published to releases, where they get
> > widely mirrored; and the less-downloaded images, constituting a larger set,
> > are published to cdimage.  Pointing at cdimage.u.c from the announcement
> > seems to run counter to this, and will probably draw far more traffic than
> > cdimage is prepared to handle.  Linking it from
> > <http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/> would have less impact, but I fear it
> > would still cripple the server.

> > I'm waiting for feedback from James to make sure we have room, but I expect
> > we'll publish UNR from releases.u.c instead for the RC, in which case
> > there's no need to link to cdimage for it.  Accomodating armel is more
> > likely to be a problem, but I'd like to try to squeeze it in as well.

> If space is the issue, what about replacing one of the less-downloaded
> images on releases?  I expect UNR to be more popular than, say, kubuntu
> alternate amd64.

Sorted, as discussed on IRC.  UNR will be on releases; pre-publishing is in
progress now.

> > The question is, which armel images are to be published?  Are we supporting
> > both desktop and alternate images for armel?  Desktop only?  Prior to beta
> > there had been no mention at all of images for ARM aside from netboot, and
> > at beta we had only a single "custom" desktop disk image available, so I'm
> > not sure what the intent is here.  The fewer images we care about
> > publishing, of course, the easier it will be to accomodate them on
> > releases.ubuntu.com.  But I need to know fairly quickly which images we want
> > to highlight, so I can get them prepublished to the mirrors in preparation
> > for the RC.  That probably also affects what we say about ARM in the
> > announcement.

> It should be desktop only (no alternate), and there is no need to try to fit
> it on releases (cdimage is most appropriate).

Ok.  Do we still want to be linking directly to cdimage.u.c from the
announcement, in that case?  Past experience suggests it will promptly fall
over if we do.

> > Assuming for the moment that we're only highlighting the desktop image for
> > ARM, I've added the following text to the draft under 'desktop features'.
> > This is really very rough, and I would appreciate some help refining it;
> > I'm afraid I just don't know what the immediate use cases for the ARM port
> > are expected to be, so don't know what we should be emphasizing here.

> >   ARM support:  this release of Ubuntu integrates support for the ARM
> >   architecture, bringing the same high-quality desktop to an even wider
> >   range of energy-efficient systems.

> The key points, I think are:

>  * Aimed at developers (there aren't actually any laptop form factor devices
>    to run this on yet)

>  * Community supported

>  * List of reference boards which work (I think the Freescale Babbage board
>    is the only one on that list at the moment)

>  * Installation is complex and not for the faint of heart (there's a wiki
>    page for this)

> David is the authority on this, but maybe this will provide a head start
> until he's awake.

Thanks, will try to massage this into some text (after I give the release
notes a little bit more attention first).

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org