Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases

Posted Apr 23, 2008 7:46 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases by vmole
Parent article: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases

I suppose what I would personally love to see would major releases "when they are ready" (à la
Debian), but six monthly updates, consisting of the last major release plus all backports
which fulfil the right stability criteria.  Plus a nice easy and granular way to enable
backports on just the software that you really need to be more up-to-date and its
dependencies.  This last would also improve testing of software in the upcoming release.  

Plus perhaps even an additional level of backports so that you can use certain software at
"developer tree" level if you are particularly interested in it, or badly need a certain new
feature.

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Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and desktop releases

Posted Apr 24, 2008 17:54 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Uh, so that would be Debian, yes?

Debian 3.1 (sarge), released 6/2005, updated 12/2005, 4/2006, 9/2006, 11/2006, 2/2007, 4/2007, 12/2007, 4/2008. Debian 4.0 (etch), released 4/2007, updated 8/2007, 12/2007, 2/2008. Admittedly not a rigid 6 month cycle, but not too bad. Also, you can pull from propesed-updates any time.

The www.backports.org site allows specific selection of individual packages. Using "apt-get -t etch-backports install foo" seems reasonably easy and granular to me. Of course, not every single package is backported, but most of the popular stuff is.