back to article Jumpin' Meerkats! Ubuntu moving to daily downloads?

Ubuntu is moving away from its established six-month-cycle and potentially to a future where software updates land on a daily basis. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said during an Ubuntu 10.10 conference call last month that a move to daily updates would help the popular Linux distro keep pace with an increasingly complex …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Is there something we forgot...?

    What about the LTS releases?

  2. Peter Mc Aulay
    Thumb Down

    Good idea for some, bad idea for most others

    From a support and platform certification perspective this is an absolute nightmare.

    While this might be a good thing for some end users (though on second thought any of my machines that need to reliably "just work" like the living room multimedia PC better not do this either), it also means that Ubuntu can kiss corporate approval goodbye.

    1. madjr

      stable lts

      there should be a stable LTS release for corporate and servers

      it should be similar to this:

      https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/GrumpyGroundhog

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Another Arch User

    The rolling release model is the primary reason I first switched to arch and it can work very well. Ubuntu is a great distro and if rolling updates are managed well this could be a very good move. Regarding PPAs, they're not the same as a package that has been officially tested by canonical before release in the repositories and are way too technical for most users. IMHO they should start slowly with this and focus on a few apps e.g. firefox and openoffice (or go-oo, libreoffice whatever). Two problems come to mind though, size of downloads increasing and the occasional bug slipping through. With the download size I think they will need to do something like only getting a diff of a package (I don't believe many package managers including apt have this ability yet), this would make updates to packages like openoffice less painful - and also quite important in developing countries where the internet access may be limited. With the possibility of bugs slipping through I think they'll have to make it easy for users to choose which major version of a package they are using or revert to an older package - this could be a support and usability nightmare though. In any case I wish the ubuntu devs the best of luck in managing this transition.

    1. madjr

      backup system

      a good backup / system rollback system needs to be in place.

      Something people can revert back to.

      It has to create a snapshot every time the user starts updating.

      older unused snapshots get deleted. But there should always be 1 or 2 snapshots the user can go back to.

      Btrfs would be the ideal, but they could have an alternative app that does this if its not ready for when they go rolling

  4. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Compromise?

    How about a new release every couple weeks or month? Surely there's better use for the organization's resources than trying to put out a daily release. And after a few, is there really enough that's significantly changed to warrant a daily release?

    Are there really people out there that have time in their lives to upgrade an OS every day?

    1. Vic

      Upgradin

      > Are there really people out there that have time in their lives to upgrade an OS every day?

      Yes. I generally spend less than a minute making sure it's not going to upgrade something I don't want it to, then I pish the "Install Updates" button. Some time later, it is done.

      Once a month or so, I reboot the laptop[1] to bring in a new kernel or suchlike.

      Vic.

      [1] I run Fedora on this laptop. It likes to upgrade stuff regularly...

  5. tardigrade

    Updates or Upgrades?

    Well update manager updates all the software that you have ppa's for as and when. For example if you add in the ppa for Chrome you can if you want have the nightly builds downloaded and updated every day. It's probably the best automatic updater around.

    I imagine what Shuttleworth is getting at is rolling the ppa's and update manager into Software Centre, so that newbies don't have to add ppa's, know what they are or even see them.

    At the moment ppa's only get into Software Centre when you add them in Software Sources or from the shell and updates aren't done from Software Centre.

    Put everything together in Software Centre and maybe that makes things simpler for new users.

  6. Justin Clements

    great

    Just what any normal user wants, a prompt every morning for updates.

    I don't want a box continually updating itself like this. Batch it to a month or 3 months, but not daily.

    People have other things to be doing than staring at an Update window each morning when they turn their machine on. They simply want to type a letter, surf a web page, read emails. Not wait until the updates have been downloaded and installed.

    This is techie masturbation at it's worse.

    1. Vic

      Not with you at all...

      > Just what any normal user wants, a prompt every morning for updates.

      There's no problem with that.

      Users rarely care whether or not there are updates - what they care about is whether or not those updates will interrupt their use of the machine.

      Updates on a Windows box are always intrusive - often requiring multiple reboots. Updates on a Linux box are not - you usually just hit the button and get back to whatever it is you were up to. It really isn't a big deal.

      > I don't want a box continually updating itself like this.

      I do. If there are bugs to be fixed, I want them fixed as soon as possible.

      > Batch it to a month or 3 months, but not daily.

      No, I completely disagree with you there.

      If something is broken, I don't want to wait a month to get the fix that someone has already published elsewhere - even if the bug is not security-related. It's pointless putting in arbitrary delays to improvements just to avoid an upgrade procedure that is completely painless anyway,

      My laptop is updated pretty much every day - sometimes more than once per day. I barely notice. I haven't rebooted it in weeks. Updates just aren't a problem.

      > People have other things to be doing than staring at an Update

      > window each morning when they turn their machine on.

      Sure - so we don't stare at update windows.

      I get an icon appear in one of my panels if there are updates available. I click it, have a quick look at the updates to make sure I want them (I always have done, so far), then click "Install Updates" and get back to what I was doing.

      > They simply want to type a letter, surf a web page, read emails.

      As do I.

      > Not wait until the updates have been downloaded and installed.

      But with Linux, you don't do that. An update doesn't mean the machine is unusable for hours at a time - it's predominantly a background process that just gets on with it whilst you go about your business.

      > This is techie masturbation at it's worse.

      No, this is non-users not understanding just how much simpler it is to upgrade a Linux box compared to a Windows one.

      Vic.

  7. Matt Hawkins

    OpenOffice

    "you dont have to wait 6 months for a new open office"

    really?

  8. yossarianuk
    Linux

    Another benefit of this ...

    .. Is that fixes will be applied upstream thus benefiting all Linux users of all distros...

    At the min the only distro where it is as easy to get the latest versions of the following software as Windows is Arch Linux.

    - Clamav

    - PHP

    - MySQL

    - Perl

    - Postgres

    - Apache

    - (not OSS) Nvidia driver

    (p.s I do not any longer use Windows (even at work Linux is allowed), As Linux is the 'poster boy' of FOSS the most popular distro should be using the latest 'stable' versions of FOSS software)

  9. Bruno Girin

    Let's get the facts straight

    This has been going around the Ubuntu mailing lists for some time. The idea is NOT to move to a rolling distro but to offer something in between.

    When you install a particular version of Ubuntu, it comes with a particular version of every single piece of software, e.g. Ubuntu 10.10 comes with the Linux kernel v2.6.35, Firefox 3.7, OpenOffice 3.2.2, etc. Those versions stay exactly the same throughout the lifetime of the release and the only updates are bug fixes. This is great for business where maintenance of a large park or machines is simplified if you know exactly what versions are running on every machine. On the other hand, for the casual user, it means that if Firefox releases a new version (say FF 4) right in the middle of the release cycle, you have to wait until the new release is out to get the new FF or you have to go through the shenanigans of setting up a custom PPA, installing a .deb package or building from source, all of which is not user friendly and is a good way to accidentally wreck your system.

    So the solution to this that Mark Shuttleworth is talking about is to make it possible for new versions of any software to appear in Software Centre at any point during the release cycle. So, to come back to the example above, if Firefox release a brand new version right in the middle of the release cycle, that new version should be available in Software Centre very shortly after it is released, so that users can decide to upgrade, should they wish to do so.

    This solution means that you can keep both types of users happy: if you are in an environment where version control is important, you can keep a well known version of your software on all machines; while if you want the latest and greatest as soon as it comes out, you can get it through the Software Centre.

    For Ubuntu and every other Linux distro, comprehensive and integrated package management is a unique selling point compared to Windows or Mac OS-X: it enables users to install any software and receive updates in a controlled manner with minimal risk to their system. It's exactly why Saint Steve wants to build an app store in OS-X. So what Ubuntu are doing is looking at the package management front-end and making it easier for users to install everything they want through that front-end, including the latest version of any software they use, without them having to know what a PPA is or what the command line looks like. All very sensible really.

  10. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
    Flame

    Insanity / Welcome to Hell

    I don't want to wake up every morning and find little gnomes have re-arranged all my furniture and the walls of my house. The "daily 'upgrade'" idea is the computer equivalent to this.

    I don't see how devs can reproduce, let alone debug, a problem, when their program's environment is changing on a _daily_ basis.

    My #1 requirement for a desktop OS is automatic, hassle-free security updates.

    My #2 requirement for a desktop OS is stability+works-out-of-the-box, but with the option for me to go out on the bleeding edge for the apps I select.

    My #3 requirement is, "don't wire in crap I don't want. You can offer the crap, but it must be optional, or at the least, easily removable."

    Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros have been giving me this for years, but lately, Ubuntu has been falling down on numbers three and two.

    Ubuntu QC is being lowered in favor of "new and shiny".

    Here's a big, hearty, wet dick-slap to Mr. Shuttleworth, and I'm off to find a different distro...

  11. Richard Lloyd
    Alert

    Why not annual releases and maybe a 6-monhly update roll-up release?

    I think what all Linux distros should do is have an annual release (e.g. 2011.0 for release in the first 6 months of 2011) and then do "rolling updates" for a year. I would also suggest a year.5 release 6 months in that is just the annual release with 6 months of updates rolled in for easier deployment (i.e. no double downloads - one for the ISO and another set for hundreds of updates).

    And, yes, you need a major new feature in each annual .0 release that the previous year's release didn't have, otherwise there's no incentive to install a later annual release. Support the latest 2 annual releases on the desktop and the latest 5 (at least) on the server and then drop the pointless "LTS" releases (all annual releases become LTS releases in other words).

  12. Dennis Healey

    Why not pick an intermediate path

    Clearly rolling updates have risks as the base keeps changing. Would it not be better to release the components as and when, in a new releases category that the enthusiasts get to try. These would be "Release candidate" grade.

    These then get rolled into the "Stable" release that happens monthly.

    Those of us who are more cautious get an improved, proven system more quickly than before as there is more chance of a sensible test regime and risk is reduced because there is in effect a soft launch that will catch the minor quirks more effectively.

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