Some considerations about the future of the repository

[voria]

As soon as karmic will be released (9 days from now), I'm considering to drop completely the support for older ubuntu versions, focusing only on Karmic in both the Ubuntu and Kubuntu versions.

There are multiple reasons for that.

First of all, I have no time to keep track and update the packages for all the ubuntu versions, actually I don't even know if the packages for the old intrepid on the repository are all at the latest versions or they have been superseeded.
Another reason is that currently the repository is bloating up due to the too many packages it contains.
This is certainly caused by the somewhat unsuccessful jaunty, with all its video and audio problems. Practically, in the last months I have backported half karmic to jaunty to get things work (kernel, pulseaudio, alsa driver and libs, video drivers).
I really don't see any good reason why someone should continue to use it (or the older intrepid), when karmic will be released.

So, the karmic release will be a good opportunity to clean up and reorganize the work, and to finally add support for kubuntu (just for the record, I'm tracking KDE and kubuntu for a while now, and looking at the current karmic beta it seems that finally it's mature enough for my tastes, so I think it's time for me to go back to KDE ).

Speaking about cleaning up and reorganization of the work, I'm referring to the forum too.
I will rewrite completely all the HOWTOs available here, starting from the one about the repository enabling, and moving through all the other ones than can be yet applied to karmic. The remaining ones shall fall into oblivion of the unsticked threads.

Any thought or suggestion about that? Please let me know.

[gatos]

Hi Voria. In the begging of your post, I was a bit apprehensive, but after reading the rest, I will have to say that yout you have a point. Considering that Jaunty is not a LTS release, I think that most people will upgrade to Karmic very soon. When 10.04 comes out, then it will be a different story. Another idea maybe could be to only support non LTS releases for lets say a year unless if the next release is seriously flawed and people (including you) decide to stick to the previous version.

[JMFTheVCI]

With Jaunty, and the work you have put into this project for all of us with an NC10, I have a very stable and efficient machine that puts some of my colleagues higher-spec laptops to shame.

Karmic is not LTS and at present it has a lot of open bugs. Some of these bugs are quite a pain for many people. (See the issues with USB modem sticks and the 2.6.31 kernel.)

Whilst I don't expect to have every backlevel variant of Ubuntu supported I would personally ask that the Jaunty stream is supported for a while longer until the more annoying bugs and the performance of new *features* are leveled out. (On my T61, karmic has been slower than Jaunty. xsplash is good but appears to take longer to get to usable. Sometimes I require multiple boots to get to workable.)

Jaunty is very stable for me at present and I would like to see it supported for at least 6 months past the karmic GA.

You are doing great work and I am sure others appreceiate it as well.

[hsasshofer]

I spent the afternoon upgrading to Karmic RC, and after some manual intervention everything seemed fine. The new boot splashes are awful, as far as I am concerned, but I don't boot my NC10 unless there is a kernel update. So up until 20 minutes ago, I would have fully agreed with the motion of "who needs Jaunty"..

But. BUT! BBUUTT!!! https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/455031 The built in UMTS/HSPA modem does not connect anymore, so in case you have that this is pretty much a show stopper.

I will be leaving for a 4 days' trip tomorrow, and I nicely "bricked" my NC10 with Karmic >:O . Well, it does connect (I am writing this via WWAN) with the USB modem that was supplied with my SIM-card, but this is certainly not an option for everyone.

So, if you are using the built-in WWAN modem be careful for the time being!

[voria]

First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts

I see your points, so I've decided to keep jaunty support for a while, at least until karmic can be considered stable enough and working as it should be.
Instead, I'm going to completely drop intrepid support.

Anyway, I'm posting right now new and updated howtos.

[FabriceV]

I have switched to Karmic. It's easier (less patched) but the boot process looks unpolished. Major advantage: a simple way to have the new version of openoffice and few other programs.
Only one minor problem. I have needed to remove and recreate wifi connection to get working network.
None problem with your karmic repository. I will test extended functions later (dual screen and so on...).

[CaptnDifool]

Hi Voria,

I share your thougts, isn't good to maintain too much versions in the same time. I agree to wait a little bit, so that karmic is enough stable and relaiable to work with. I will upgrade soon to karmic my NC10 after my E252 has done.

@FabriceV
Thank you for your short report. I think, it will not difficult, to run karmic with the NC10. My auto-updater is waiting for the final click to upgrade to karmic...

[JMFTheVCI]

FYI, I was one of those advocating holding on to Jaunty for a little while longer.

I have now moved to Karmic on my NC10 main machine and I am also experimenting with Lucid (but on a Lenovo T61).

Thanks for your work. Excellent stuff.

[voria]

I'm going to remove all Jaunty's packages from the repository in the next days, in order to free some space (repositories on Launchpad are capped to 1GB of usable space max) and start to work on the next to be released Ubuntu Lucid.

[voria]

Packages for Jaunty are gone.

[KunalGautam]

How about RPM repository for Fedora and Suse ??