In yesterday’s meeting we covered two of the topics from Mark’s proposal to the Technical Board:

Reducing the length of support for our regular (non-LTS) releases

The rationale here is that it’s costing a lot of time to maintain all those releases for 18 months. It’s also causing a lot of load on the SRU team and on developers to ensure that upgrading from one release to the other won’t cause regressions due to fixes being SRUed only to a few releases.

The change in support length from 18 months to 9 months will reduce the number of releases we need to support in parallel while still allowing enough time for our users to upgrade to the next release.

This change will affect Ubuntu releases starting with 13.04, any older regular release will still be supported for 18 months and LTS releases will still be supported for 5 years.

This change was approved through two votes, the first about shortening the support length to 9 months and the second about doing it starting with 13.04. Both votes had all 3 attending Technical Board members’ approval and had general support by the other members from mailing-list discussions.

Enable users to continuously track the development focus of Ubuntu
without having to explicitly upgrade

This discussion was about making it easier for some of our users to keep their machine always on the current development release.

This has nothing to do with Rolling Releases and is purely about setting up some kind of meta-series on the archive mirrors that people can use instead of having to manually upgrade from one development release to the next.

There again, all 3 present members agreed with this proposal.

Other discussions

Outside of those two items, we also briefly discussed some changes to our update tool to allow our users to upgrade by more than a single release at a time.

In the current state of things we allow for upgrades from a release to the next or from an LTS release to the next LTS release.

The plan here is to change that, so that a user of Ubuntu 12.10 could directly update to Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.

This change should make the life of our users much easier and will ensure that we get to the next LTS with much more reliable and well tested upgrades.

The Technical Board didn’t feel that there would be anything to vote on at this time and leaves the implementation and testing of this to the various teams involved (Foundations, QA, Release).

The 3 items the Technical Board has voted on and accepted are considered as final. We do not expect to have to vote again on any of this and are just waiting on the implementation of those.

Stéphane Graber, on behalf of the Ubuntu Technical Board