Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 11:44 +0000, James Freer wrote:
The question i would raise is "how much" testing do they do - i'd say not enough. They seem to put themselves under a lot of pressure to provide a new version every 6 months - why not just each year and thoroughly test. From what i have understood the upgrade is for security only. But then as i've noticed with 6.04 Firefox wasn't upgraded.
To be honest most migration problems will be relating to either out of package meddling (strange configs, hand installed software conflicting with registered packages, packages from third party resources etc) or specific to some particular hardware (in itself hard to test against due to the diversity of the x86 platform) Firefox in 6.06 was upgraded from 5.10 I am sure.
1 yearly upgrades would mean that people would spend a lot of time running out of date packages due to ubuntu's policy of not incrementing software versions generally for ongoing updates to an existing installation. This is I feel important as it provides a degree of predictability in that if you say you are on Ubuntu 6.06 I can reasonably safely make the assumption of kernel version x and gnome version y etc. The LTS versions are an alternative of 6 monthly updates at the cost of running older software..you takes your choice.
Also...and this IMO is key.
If you update yearly then really the software versions you are going to want to include aren't going to be even released until the last half of the existing Ubuntu versions lifetime..so what do you do for the first 6 months given that some of the software versions you plan to include don't even exist ? You can't test properly unless you are running the shipping versions of the included packages.
in answer you your individual points
a] not something I have ever seen..sorry. Sounds like the Bios on both machines was reporting 2 floppies as I cannot understand otherwise how this would happen, did they have zip drives or something else that may have been miss identified ?
b] 6.06 surely ? In what way did the update get confused ? tbh a general problem here would be all over the net considering the number of people with machines still on LTS (me included)
c] There always are problems on the forums with a new version I can't remember if 7.04 was any worse or better than previous or latter versions, I ran it for 6 months+ so it couldn't have been all bad, in fact I remember updating to 7.04 a little bit earlier before official release than I usually do..again hardware diversity and people only posting when there is a problem and not when it works just fine distort results. A place used by and large as a support forum isn't a great place to gauge software quality because how do you know how many people aren't having problems ?
d] Never heard of this or experienced any synaptic problems with any of the 5 or 6 7.10 systems I have used..again it would be interesting to see linkage or specifics.
e] This I want to see..a ps2 keyboard that provides a USB interface ? Sounds hardly standard to me in fact I am not even sure how this would work. Have you submitted a bug or asked for help in the forums as if this keyboard is reasonably common I would expect a lot of interest.
It sounds like I am defending Ubuntu rather aggressively here..it is not my intention to suggest that Ubuntu is the best option always. If another distro works out better for you or you prefer a 1 year release schedule then the beauty of linux is that you are free to try it. Maybe Debian's release strategy would be a better fit for you as you can make a choice as to how "bleeding edge" you want your system and then have rolling upgrades rather than a fixed "new distro" cycle.
Kind Regards Wayne
Didn't you say you worked in Stowmarket at some stage? Then when i'm in this Tue i'll give you the PC and the ps2 keyboard - you can have a play!
a] Can't have been the bios: when i installed 6.06, 7.04, 7.10 and opensuse 10.3 it worked fine.
b] Sorry 6.06... bit of rapid typing i should have checked.
d] well it was two problems i had... but after using aptitude i somehow sorted out the conflicts. It didn't give me much confidence. Synaptic and apt-get install but don't necessarily sort out all dependencies and conflicts it seems. Only reason for not using aptitude is that folk don't understand the rather odd "quasi-graphical" interface (if you can call it that - quoted from a book). The last problem was using Lyx, winefish and bluefish - had to remove winefish and bluefish.
e] bought from ebuyer #83108 - about 18 months/two years ago now. It was a ps2 keyboard but had a lead for a usb, audio and mic ports - just convenience i suppose for those without those ports on the front of their PC. Very useful for me using a memory stick with windows. Hence why i got a couple... having had the experience of a keyboard going one evening and needing to do school work for the next day i got a spare! I tested both keyboards on windows and ubuntu - tesco one worked fine on both - #83108 only on windows. Somehow there must be some difference in spec for Linux. I did mention it on IRC alug - just one or two comments. At the end of the day it's easier to just get a cheapy from Tesco. As i said at the beginning you can SEE on Tue or Thu.
james