Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30 [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 29, 2006 23:51 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

If you expect support, prepare to be asked to upgrade you system. It may be once in three years or once in three months. It's your choice. It may be painful either way.

Actually, it should be possible to maintain a distribution forever with only minimal security fixes. But I don't think that really old software is actively tested for impact of newly discovered security threats. You think somebody is running Coverity on Linux 2.0.x? You probably shouldn't connect such system to any networks.

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 6:11 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Well, my distro of choice, CentOS, gives me a great deal of flexibility along these lines. I have the option to upgrade every 18 months. But I don't have to upgrade more frequently than every 7 years. It's all my choice, and I can make that choice on a client by client, server by server basis.

I'm sure that Debian is a good distro.

But Debian proponents tend to have a very irritating habit of jumping into discussions with some one-liner that implies that Debian is Shangri-La.

And it just ain't so.

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 20:17 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Actually someone pointed out that upgrading Ubuntu (a word that was missing in that post) is not a reinstall. Rather it is a dist-upgrade in the good old Debian tradition.

BTW: it is actually RedHat[tm] that does most of the maintenance work of CentOS. And I must say I quite pity anybody still using the ancient RHEL/CentOS 2.x (basically equivalent to RH7.x).

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 9:20 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

> No OS upgrade is ever completely painless.

I'm going to call you sadly misinformed on that one. I've done a number of OS upgrades that were completely painless! The oldest one that I can recall for sure was the upgrade from DOS 3.1 to 3.2. But there have been others, before and since. They may be rare, but they happen.

I would, however, agree with the proposition that no OS upgrade can ever be guaranteed to be painless or should ever be expected to be painless. But I will say that Debian has, on average, been less painful to upgrade than most other systems I've used (a fairly large number). A couple of Debian upgrades (in the early days) were even that semi-mythical beast, the painless upgrade. I realize that's anecdotal evidence, but it's valid to me.

In any case, he didn't say Debian, he said Debian-based systems. We're taling about Ubuntu here, which is a Debian-based system, and the whole point of Ubuntu was to provide more frequent and predictable releases than Debian has been. So complaining about Debian's release schedule is missing the point entirely!

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 15:05 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Well, you can call me stupid. Or you can call me incompetent. Or you say I don't learn from my mistakes. But misinformed is off the mark. I've done too many upgrades in a production environment for that. ;-)

Your points are well taken. But in the end it is actaully you who are missing the point of my post.

It is not my intent to start a big flame-war, or even a debate upon the matter.

It's just that there are so many short, misleading posts from Debian fans suggesting that Debian and Debian based distros are Nirvana. And if it gets said with enough frequency without being challenged, people actually start believing their own propaganda, and that's not good.

I make it a point to say something when I see short posts suggesting that Debian has no upgrade problems, or is the only distro that doesn't have dependency hell.

Please don't take this post as being in an argumentative tone, btw.

My main goal is to difuse misinformation, and not to trash Debian, which is an important component of our FL/OSS ecosystem.

And now, to change the subject slightly...

I've personally found it interesting watching the Debian project start to come to terms with the first really successful Debian based distro that is not Debian proper. Previously, the Debian project itself has always called the shots in the Debian province. Now we have top notch Debian based Distro who's creators have ideas of their own. And the Debian project has something that it has never had before: competition right in its own back yard. The good news is that I think they have mostly gotten through the denial phase.

And my God, look how long this post has grown! I'll stop now. ;-)

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 31, 2006 12:30 UTC (Fri) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]

Yes, they did ask us all to move up 3.5 years. They also gave us a step by step guide on how to do it. And (at least for me) it worked.

I did as I was told, followed the guide and sat back to wait. I made one tiny error: I accidentally kicked out the mains plug halfway through the upgrade (no, really!!!).

So I rebooted the box, restarted the upgrade, and it finished correctly, with everything still working, all repositories upgraded correctly. Not one error. Now that's pretty painless.

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Apr 1, 2006 11:15 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

I'm gonna call foul on that BS. No OS upgrade is ever completely painless. And Debian? Wasn't it just 8 months ago that Debian asked its Debian Stable users to jump from all the packages in its 2002 release to the new 2005 packages. That's 3.5 years of package upgrades. You can't tell me that didn't cause a few problems. And please, please don't tell me that I should have been using Debian Testing.

Huh? Are you saying that you do not maintain your system, that you instead sit on some static "release" until the next one comes along?

Anyone who "jump[s]" from one release to the next is begging for trouble. Anyone who lets a connected system go 3.5 years without an upgrade is rolling some loaded dice.

Weekly upgrades seem reasonable for typical home systems. It's not that hard to do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' on a regular basis (or use Synaptic or other GUI thingy, if you prefer). There is really no excuse to "jump from all the packages in its 2002 release to the new 2005 packages". That is so utterly silly that it suggests you are either completely unaware of how things work, or distorting reality to try to fit it into a bizarre argument, or had temporary brain disconnect when you typed that.

Moving from one "release" to the next in a Debian-based system is just one more step on a continuous stairway. I have one computer at home which has "stable" in its sources.list and the way that I know when it goes from one "release" to the next is by reading about it afterwards at places like LWN. The routine, weekly upgrades are incremental steps. It's more of a disruption when I change custom kernels than when Debian stamps a release as stable. The only big problem I remember running into was when "Potato" went stable (that was before Woody, which was before Sarge). I had installed X from source and managed to munge up my package management. It recovered from my mistakes fairly gracefully, considering.

You just don't wipe out a working Debian system and pop in the next "release" CD. That's just silly playing, not sensible usage.