Firefox has certainly been upgraded through the updates although we have yet to reach version 2.
Bev.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wayne Stallwood" ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk To: ALUG main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Web interface to apt-get upgrade|ubuntu upgrades! testing? Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:04:05 +0000
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1 yearly upgrades would mean that people would spend a lot of time running out of date packages due to ubuntu's policy of not incrementing software versions generally for ongoing updates to an existing installation.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
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Bev Nicolson