On Wednesday, March 06, 2013 09:59:14 AM Rodney Dawes wrote: > On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 17:06 -0800, Allison Randal wrote: > > On 03/05/2013 04:41 PM, Michael Hall wrote: > > > I think different segments of the community have different ideas of what > > > "stable" means: > > > > > > Distro devs & power users: "stable" == "things don't break" > > > > > > App devs, OEMS, NTEU: "stable" == "things don't change" > > > > > > > > > I think what we're going for in a rolling release is a release where > > > things change, but don't break. While an LTS release is one where > > > things neither change nor break. > > > > It wasn't stated as "you might prefer the LTS, many OEMs do". It was > > stated as "you shouldn't deliver the rolling release to customers". And, > > really, that does seem to fit the discussion threads. It doesn't sound > > like it's possible to deliver a user experience in the rolling scenario > > that would be high-enough quality for System76 to ship directly to > > customers (and many of theirs are power users). Even people who are > > totally on board with "rolling releases" are still calling it the > > "development release". > > I think the problem is the use of the word "release" for the rolling > archive. > It's not a release. It's a constantly changing archive, where we have > some > automated testing to try to prevent things breaking. Also, there is a > history > of Ubuntu's 6-monthly releases being perceived as stable, when they > weren't > necessarily. After LTS was introduced, they started becoming more of the > "shake things up a bit in between LTS" releases that we have now, and > while > generally stable as in "things mostly don't break" they have had some > rather > large changes in them from the previous version. > > OEMs wouldn't ship rawhide, Firefox nightlies, Windows beta, etc… to > their > users, so why would they do it with Ubuntu? > > As far as what Ubuntu OEMs ship to users, System76 seems to be the > exception > more than the rule. > > If I were building hardware and shipping it with an OS on it, I'd ship > the > LTS and/or LTS point releases with HWE stack, rather than interim > releases, > and certainly not the rolling archive. With the rolling archive, they > could > ship hardware that works fine one day, and a kernel regression or > something > could slip in unnoticed, and then all their customers with that hardware > might > have a system that won't boot after installing updates the next day. > It's > just a bad plan all around to go that route. I understand they want to > ship > the new shiny, as early and often as possible, but I don't think it's a > feasible plan to do so. If there are certain things they think must get > shipped > to customers, then maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to work more > with > the OEM team at Canonical to get things done, similar to how Dell and > other > OEMs do.
I'm sure it wouldn't be a bad idea for Canonical to have a new customer for OEM services. I just checked and ZaReason (who also doesn't pay Canonical OEM services) offers both Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. They also offer Kubuntu and Edubuntu 12.04. I don't know how many companies are shipping Ubuntu flavors based off of the public distribution, but of the two I know of, both offer the current release. Scott K -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
