Michael Pobega wrote:
Exactly. The policy for Ubuntu is 18 month support for normal versions, 36 month for Dapper, which was released in June 2006. However, Edgy will not merge into Dapper because Dapper is fixed. The only thing that changes with Dapper are security related, much like Sarge is today. The support for Edgy will end before the support for Dapper does.Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 07:03:18AM +0100, Joe Hart wrote:Yes, it works that way because Debian Testing is constantly being updated with packages. The latest release of Ubuntu is always a snapshot of Unstable a few months before they release. By the time they do release, a large number of the packages have already migrated to Testing.So Ubuntu in effect Freezes the release sooner and then just does bug fixes until they figure it is stable enough, whereas Debian doesn't freeze testing untill more stuff is ready? Doug.You can say that. Except the thing is after an Ubuntu version is out of date, Canonical no longer supports that version with updates and the likes. So if by the end of the six month period 6.10 has 300 bugs, they will never be fixed. And from what I can tell, Dapper isn't really going to be LTS as you'd think. I'm pretty sure once Feisty becomes the newest Ubuntu release the Edgy packages will just roll down into Dapper, kind of like after Testing becomes Stable in Debian.
There is a backports project that will allow people using older versions to get updated applications, and kubuntu.org places newer versions of the programs it uses on it's website, so I was running KDE 3.5.6 on Edgy, but only have 3.5.5 on this Etch system.
Keep in mind that Ubuntu only supports a small subset of packages. I've heard their repositories are pulled strait from Sid and nobody bothers to test more than the core that they support to see if it actually works. If you run Ubuntu, and enable the universe and multiverse repos, you're simply opening contrib and non-free on sid. While that may work for some, it isn't advisable in a production scenario. If Ubuntu was only targeting the desktop, that would be fine but they're not.
I don't know for sure if that is true. I'm quite sure that someone will correct me if they know different.
Joe