updates of enterprise edition

[Rejo Zenger]

Hi,

On the website of Ubuntu, some words are said on the release schedule of
Ubuntu. Most of this is clearly explained, but I do have some additional
questions. I believe the following is correct:

 - There is every 6 months a new regular release, with 18 months of
   support. Examples of these releases are Warty, Hoary, Dapper and the
   upcoming Etch. When updating, you cannot skip releases, when updating
   two releases, you need to update to the intermediate release before
   updating to the second release.

 - There is every 12 to 24 months a new "enterprise release". These have
   had better testing and should be more stable. These release should
   have longer support than the regular releases (but the actual support
   period isn't mentioned on the site. The only enterprise release until
   now is Dapper. You can update from enterprise release to enterprise
   release, without having to update to the intermedia regular releases.

 - There is sometimes a release with Long Time Support, with support for
   60 months. The only release with LTS until is Dapper.

 - Every release is released with a desktop and server edition.

Right? If so, I was wondering:

 - How long does an enterprise version receive support? Is an enterprise
   release always a LTS release as well, or will be there enterprise
   releases with shorter support periods in future?

 - Is there a schedule for "enterprise release" releases? Say, something
   like "every third regular releases should or will be an enterprise
   release"?

 - If, for example, the fourth release after Dapper becomes the new
   "enterprise release", what happens to the universe and multiverse
   repositories of Dapper between Etch and the new enterprise release?
   Are they still being maintained, or should I expect "the community"
   to forget about the Dapper universe and multiverse repositories and
   to work only on those repositories of new regular releases?
   
 - Say, I have a production environment with tens of company critical
   servers running Dapper. Is my assumption correct that I should be
   running Dapper until the next enterprise release has been released,
   even if this takes 24 months? 

The reason for these questions is that if you are running a Debian
stable release, the only way of running a packaged version of, eg, PHP5
would be to use backports. In my experience, these backports are not
always fully reliable to depend on, escpecially not when used in a
production environment. Now I am looking for a platform which allows me
to run newer versions of applications (PHP 5, MySQL 5, Nagios 2, etc) as
request by customers, without having to rely on unreliable repositories,
running unstable versions of distributions or building packages myself.

It's not that I want to run anything a customer requests, but I would
like to find the distribution and release cycle that makes me as
flexible as possible with maintained packages, without to much
trade-offs in terms of stability, reliabily, maintainability and
security.

Thank you for your help!

-- 
Rejo Zenger <rejo at zenger.nl> https://rejo.zenger.nl
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