Is a 16.04 alpha 2 needed?

[Philip Muskovac]

On Monday, January 25, 2016 09:38:39 PM Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> According to <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseSchedule>, this is
> the week we would plan to do Alpha 2 for Xenial if there was a need for one.
> 
> And according to <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseTaskSignup>, no
> one has signed up to do any of the work for this particular alpha milestone.
> 
> Is this alpha needed by any of the teams?  The thought some time ago was
> that the continuous installability guarantees of proposed-migration would
> make specific alpha milestones unnecessary.  The Ubuntu team have been
> making use of this now for several cycles to great effect.  Are other
> flavors still finding these alphas necessary, or is the system of
> continuously-installable images working for you?  Does someone wish to step
> forward to drive alpha 2?
> 
> Thanks,
> 

Just for the record: Kubuntu won't be participating in Alpha 2 because we won't manage to land anything worth testing this week.

Now to the question:
I still believe the Alphas provide some value, because esp. for us flavors that don't have lots of testers that regularly check the images, it's a nice way to bundle some resources and also communicate between flavors to not break each other for a couple days, instead of just "uh hey, can people please test the daily images over the next few days, some might work as intended". As has already been said, lots of the automatic QA is so still *u*buntu specific, so at least kubuntu is still mostly relying on manual QA, and it's not like every develop pays/can pay attention to not break any flavor, so the "continuous installability guarantee" either *just* covers the packages, not the images, or it just covers ubuntu again.
So please leave us the possibility to be able to publish tested and somewhat guaranteed-to-work images during development, even if not all of us make use of it all the time.

Thanks for all your work,
Philip
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