Call for discussion to clarify the IRC guidelines

[Juha Siltala]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:48, Matt Darcy
<ubuntu.lists at projecthugo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 20/07/2011 11:07, Alan Pope wrote:

>>> to be blunt, if you are an inexperienced user, why would you be using the
>>> unsupported beta product,
>>
>> For fun?
>
> Yes, that's fine, but then I don't expect to see "I NEED THIS TO WORK IT's
> MY MAIN MACHINE !!! or "I lost all my work, HELP !!!!"
>
> what's the point of people putting these warnings on, setting up support
> channels such as #ubuntu+1 for other people to decide they are not happy
> with the level of support and use other support channels that explictly do
> not support that software - I don't like that and I find it rude.

I agree with Matt that we should simply direct +1 users to #ubuntu+1,
away from #ubuntu. They are testing a new release and them taking
support time in #ubuntu is not desirable.

> the EOL stuff is very interesting, and I don't see a problem with "fixing"
> something in EOL, eg: my host file is corrupted, but when it comes to
> actually resolving a problem I find that a worthless task as the fix will
> never make it into the repos as they are dead, 3rd parties will have swapped
> focus onto non-EOL versions, and packages in the repos may have been
> moved/removed, if we are going to support the EOL stuff, what's the point of
> making it EOL, may as well say support runs for ever but package support is
> dead after 18months.

I also agree with this. Users who are on an EOL release for one reason
or another should be given instructions on how to upgrade to a
supported release. Very old software is a) difficult to support in the
first place, and b) dangerous on the Internet with all the possible
security issues involved.

-- 
Juha Siltala