Written by kevinfishburne the 5 Mar 09 at 07:34.

I propose that the Canonical programming staff and their partners in the community split their attention 50/50 between (1) choosing and refining the packages for the next Ubuntu release and (2) maintaining and QA-testing all Ubuntu x.xx LTS backports repositories. The level of work admirably performed by the backports staff for LTS releases should receive equal attention to that performed by regular app maintainers and cherry-pickers of packages for future releases.

While this may sound drastic or like a waste of resources, it is imperative that Ubuntu become more than a six-month freak show of an OS that runs near perfectly on SOME hardware configurations. LTS releases should be -fully- supported, including bug-fix patches and kernel modifications that add support of newer hardware while attempting to avoid regressions, misconfigurations and other fashionable bugs.

(This calls for some programmers and programming teams to make more realistic distinctions between stable and developmental versions of applications.)

Granted, it is difficult to distinguish between a "stable" version and any other version, so how would one decide to include an allegedly stable version of an application into the backports repository? That question is what needs to be addressed by the backports community (you, I and Canonical) and dealt with by greater resources, imagination, and vigilance.

I propose that the Canonical programming staff and their partners in the community split their attention 50/50 between (1) choosing and refining the packages for the next Ubuntu release and (2) maintaining and QA-testing all Ubuntu x.xx LTS backports repositories. The level of work admirably performed by the backports staff for LTS releases should receive equal attention to that performed by regular app maintainers and cherry-pickers of packages for future releases. While this may sound drastic or like a waste of resources, it is imperative that Ubuntu become more than a six-month freak show of an OS that runs near perfectly on SOME hardware configurations. LTS releases should be -fully- supported, including bug-fix patches and kernel modifications that add support of newer hardware while attempting to avoid regressions, misconfigurations and other fashionable bugs. (This calls for some programmers and programming teams to make more realistic distinctions between stable and developmental versions of applications.) Granted, it is difficult to distinguish between a "stable" version and any other version, so how would one decide to include an allegedly stable version of an application into the backports repository? That question is what needs to be addressed by the backports community (you, I and Canonical) and dealt with by greater resources, imagination, and vigilance.