On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 06:04:14PM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > Stability in software > > Why is it that 8.04 “LTS” has such a wave of new features and new > > versions of software that have not been time-tested to be stable? LTS > > releases (meant to be exceptionally stable) should not have so many > > additions to its feature set. > > We didn't choose Firefox 3 because we wanted the latest features---quite the > opposite! While Firefox 2 may have been more mature at the time of release, > it's also nearing two years of age and is scheduled for mothballing in > December, just eight months after Ubuntu 8.04. > > With Ubuntu Desktop LTS scheduled for three years of maintenance, Firefox 3 > was the only reasonable choice, paradoxical though it may seem. If you've > read the source code for Firefox security patches, you'll understand why! > > While the initial version we included may have had some rough edges, we're > in better shape for the long term by staying aligned with Mozilla.
I suspect this situation holds true throughout nearly all open source projects. I run into the same dilemma myself a lot in X.org. Frequently upstream decides $TECH is too horribly broken, so they create $TECH+1 which is often a from-scratch rewrite, which often means trading one set of bugs for another. Unfortunately, upstream then takes the step of dropping all ongoing support for $TECH (sometimes even making the $TECH+1 incompatible with $TECH; or support for new hardware is added only to $TECH+1 not $TECH; or bug reports we upstream get closed as "plz reproduce with $TECH+1"), leaving us in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation. At least, when we "do", upstream will share the damnation load with us. ;-) Bryce -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
