Ubuntu upgrades (was: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary) [LWN.net]

Ubuntu upgrades (was: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary)

Posted Dec 25, 2008 8:47 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804)
In reply to: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary by mikov
Parent article: Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

I did not know that. How does it work out in practice - do they provide security support for two non-LTS releases back? Can you upgrade directly from release-2 to current, or do you have to do it in stages? The latter would be a major pain.

Non-LTS releases receive 18 months of security support, however upgrades from release-2 to current has to be done in stages. LTS releases get 3 years of desktop support and 5 years of server support, and you can upgrade directly from one LTS release to another.

There are some caveats with this: the upgrade process, particularly LTS to LTS, is pretty fragile compared to Debian, which has very smooth upgrades thanks to the daily upgrade testing provided by testing and unstable. The other is support is only guaranteed for packages in main, which is fairly limited, and the stable release update (SRU) process is very slow.

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