[2076] in athena10
Re: LTS support policy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Sun Apr 5 16:43:17 2009
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 16:42:44 -0400
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: Tom Fitzgerald <tfitz@mit.edu>
Cc: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>, Debathena <debathena@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <20090405204243.GI21912@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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> Tom Fitzgerald wrote:
> > If the clock starts running on the day the LTS appears and y'all
> > start updating Athena packages, then 6 months might be tight. We'd
> > like to see installations with Athena changes stable for a month
> > or so before we start upgrading in bulk.
Fortunately it's not the case that we wait until the upstream is
released before we start updating Athena packages.
Ubuntu development, like Debian, is such that anyone can run an
upcoming release from the day it begins, six months out, and from
about a month in advance it's in beta and plenty stable enough to
develop against. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyReleaseSchedule for
an example. So in fact we do run the upcoming release on some
machines in advance, and we make adjustments.
Ideally on the day that Ubuntu releases, we're done and your clock of
a month or so can start.
For Intrepid we didn't quite make that ideal; we did some necessary
small changes in advance, but it took us until about a week after
release to make the one substantive change we needed. (Not a month.)
Does that address your concern?
Greg
On Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 10:54:41AM -0400, Evan Broder wrote:
> I'm having a hard time coming up with a concrete answer for you, largely
> because I've only been through 2 new releases so far, so it's hard for
> me to generalize.
>
> First of all, Dapper's June release seems to be an anomaly. Every other
> release of Ubuntu has happened in April/October. Also, the April/October
> releases are usually around the 18-25th of the month, while Dapper was
> released June 1, so it was only about 5 weeks late, not two months.
>
> I still don't really have a good feel for what our
> new-release-engineering looks like going forward. We totally dropped the
> ball on getting Intrepid ready, but they also made some substantial
> changes to PAM configuration, which of course we interact with heavily.
> Debathena Intrepid was fine for debathena-standard, but debathena-login
> and debathena-formerly-known-as-workstation didn't work for about a
> month after the Intrepid release.
>
> We start trying to build packages for a new release at least a month or
> two before it's released. We've had packages for Jaunty in the apt repo
> since the beginning of March, and the only reason we didn't have it
> sooner is because we needed to do some cleanup of that infrastructure,
> which has now been done. I think that everything but debathena-cluster
> already works on Jaunty.
>
> In general, it's definitely our goal to have Debathena working for
> everything (except maybe full-fledged cluster) by the time a new Ubuntu
> version releases. But it's always a function of what the new release has
> changed, how hosed we are in the month beforehand, etc, etc. I expect to
> find that debathena-standard consistently works, since that's largely
> just rebuilding our own software (although I guess I already know that
> won't be the case for Karmic...). As you move up the metapackage chain,
> things become less likely to Just Work.
>
> - Evan
