[6074] in Release_7.7_team
Trumping meeting agenda item: Standardize Athena 10 on the Ubuntu 6 month release cycle?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri Oct 31 16:17:56 2008
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:16:44 -0400
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On the agenda for Wednesday's Release Team meeting is to discuss
whether Athena 10 should standardize on the LTS Ubuntu release cycle
or the 6 month cycle.
The more I chat with individuals one on one, the more it seems to
make sense that Athena 10 should seek to make the 6 month cycle
work. This would entail an Athena release cycle that updates to the
x.04 Ubuntu release over the summer, and to the x.10 release for IAP
deployment.
The benefits of doing this are:
Third party software and libraries are always at their most current
which is a position alexp favors.
Hardware support is always at its most current which jdreed and wdc
favor.
A well-defined update cycle enables customers and IS&T personnel
(and leadership) to set
expectations simply and rigorously, which wdc strongly favors.
The costs of doing this is:
A commitment to resourcing the update cycle.
Athena 10 is supposed to be "easier to maintain" than Athena 9
because it relies more on upstream stuff, and because we're trying to
rely on upstream documentation to handle more of the disruptions
across changes.
But we haven't actually done an update. The original tech plan
mapped out by ghudson assumed we'd develop and deploy on the 8.04
Hardy LTS release and go live in January 2009 with it.
Suggestions moving forward:
Let us plan to adopt the 6 month cycle, and attempt to have an 8.10
Intrepid OS as the IAP version of Athena 10, and have the following
fallbacks planned:
1. Delayed update to 8.10 Intrepid because we want to complete all
Technical Plan milestones and to close all blocker open issues before
we change the OS.
2. Skip the 8.10 update and go to 9.04 for the Summer '09 release if
we encounter issues in updating to 8.10 that would require resourcing
beyond present levels to resolve in a timely manner.
With all that said, shall we "Go for it," or do we still want to
discuss this in person on Thursday?
-Bill
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William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
