Solved Issue installing Korora
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Let me ask this a totally different way....
- What makes you believe that LTS receives "full" support, meaning the kind of support we expect from RHEL, for stability issues on Ubuntu LTS? Has Canonical ever promised you this support? AFAIK, they have never promised it to me.
- I have no reason to believe that the agreement that we had with Canonical was not honoured. The belief was that we had just assumed that LTS was going to get full support, but that was not what the agreement said. Bad assumptions.
- I've never been upset with Canonical about this. AFAIK this is just a mistake in the community with lots of customers and not even customers passing bad info around amongst themselves with Canonical not in the picture at all.
- Looking up the support options, I don't see anything from Canonical publicly to suggest that LTS gets special support.
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LTS is an abbreviation for “Long Term Support”.
We produce a new Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server release every six months. That means you'll always have the latest and greatest applications that the open source world has to offer. Ubuntu is designed with security in mind. You get free security updates for at least 9 months on the desktop and server.
A new LTS version is released every two years. In previous releases, a Long Term Support (LTS) version had three years support on Ubuntu (Desktop) and five years on Ubuntu Server. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, both versions received five years support. There is no extra fee for the LTS version; we make our very best work available to everyone on the same free terms. Upgrades to new versions of Ubuntu are and always will be free of charge.
The LTS designation applies only to specific subsets of the Ubuntu archive. The LTS may not apply to all flavours and remixes of Ubuntu. For example, for 8.04 LTS, Kubuntu chose to move to KDE 4.0 and didn't issue an LTS release. In 10.04, the Netbook Edition was not an LTS. The project will decide which flavours will be LTS and the support duration for each, early in the LTS development cycle.
To see the latest information on releases, please look at Ubuntu release end of life page on www.ubuntu.com
Release Plan Details
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We start stabilising the release early by significantly limiting the number of new features. We will choose which features we package into the LTS release, versus which ones we leave out and allow for users to optionally download and use from a separate archive.
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Avoid structural changes as far as possible, such as changing the default set of applications, lots of library transitions, or system layer changes (example: introducing KMS or hal → DeviceKit would not have been appropriate changes in a LTS).
Furthermore, we define the LTS to be:
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Enterprise Focused: We are targeting server and multiple desktop installations, where the average user is moderately risk averse.
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Compatible with New Hardware: We will make point releases throughout the development cycle to provide functional support for new server and desktop hardware.
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More Tested: We will shorten the development window and extend the Beta cycle to allow for more testing and bug fixing
and clearly state that it is not:
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A Feature-Based Release: We will focus on hardening functionality of existing features, versus introducing new ones1, except for in the areas of Online Services and Desktop Experience2.
- Exceptions for priority projects will be documented.
- Because these two areas of development are relatively new, they still require new features to satisfy the original reasons for their creation
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Cutting Edge: Starting with the 14.04 LTS development cycle, automatic full package import is performed from Debian unstable1
- This is due to deploying ProposedMigration in the Ubuntu archive.
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In years of looking at this and discussing this, no one has ever produced anything that suggests that Canonical claims that there is full support for LTS. I truly believe that this is just about educating the public about what LTS really means to Canonical. I think this is about mistaken public perception. Not about Canonical not doing what they are supposed to do.
If you look at the LTS release information, it is vague. Of course it is, because it's not a legal document and this is free. All they stand by is "support". That doesn't really mean anything. Yes, they continue security releases, that much we know. And they do that. But fixes breaks or race conditions? They make no statement that suggests that they do that for LTS (they don't say that they do it at all.) Likely they only fix those things "between" current releases.
My point has always been that this is not that support doesn't exist for LTS, but that the level of support that IT pros assume and mean when they say support is not what is meant, or even implied, by the vendor.
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@scottalanmiller said in Issue installing Korora:
Let me ask this a totally different way....
- What makes you believe that LTS receives "full" support, meaning the kind of support we expect from RHEL, for stability issues on Ubuntu LTS? Has Canonical ever promised you this support? AFAIK, they have never promised it to me.
- I have no reason to believe that the agreement that we had with Canonical was not honoured. The belief was that we had just assumed that LTS was going to get full support, but that was not what the agreement said. Bad assumptions.
- I've never been upset with Canonical about this. AFAIK this is just a mistake in the community with lots of customers and not even customers passing bad info around amongst themselves with Canonical not in the picture at all.
- Looking up the support options, I don't see anything from Canonical publicly to suggest that LTS gets special support.
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https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/ubuntu-advantage/service-description#ua-support-scope
Kernel is supported for the entire lifecycle of the LTS.
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@Romo exactly, nowhere that I can find do they ever promise to provide what we call "full" support for LTS. It's slower changing, better tested, patched with security fixes for X years... but never do they promise or even suggest that they are going to deal with stability issues. The LTS release is what it is beyond what they state.
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@stacksofplates said in Issue installing Korora:
@scottalanmiller said in Issue installing Korora:
Let me ask this a totally different way....
- What makes you believe that LTS receives "full" support, meaning the kind of support we expect from RHEL, for stability issues on Ubuntu LTS? Has Canonical ever promised you this support? AFAIK, they have never promised it to me.
- I have no reason to believe that the agreement that we had with Canonical was not honoured. The belief was that we had just assumed that LTS was going to get full support, but that was not what the agreement said. Bad assumptions.
- I've never been upset with Canonical about this. AFAIK this is just a mistake in the community with lots of customers and not even customers passing bad info around amongst themselves with Canonical not in the picture at all.
- Looking up the support options, I don't see anything from Canonical publicly to suggest that LTS gets special support.
Right, they state that they "support" you in using the product. They never claim that they will "fix" stability issues in LTS. They will sometimes, of course, if it is in their interest. But they don't seem to ever state that they are supposed to do this. It's just a false assumption that the public has made based, I assume on the LTS name and a tradition of getting this kind of support from RHEL and Suse so people just assume that it applies to Ubuntu as well.
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It's all about the definition of support. They will certainly support getting the product installed. But they are under no known obligation to support problems in the code, even their own code. They will definitely help you update to a newer version that might address those problems, though.
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@scottalanmiller said in Issue installing Korora:
It's all about the definition of support. They will certainly support getting the product installed. But they are under no known obligation to support problems in the code, even their own code.
So against my arguments before, they don't own the code either. RedHat has an advantage there. They produce Fedora. Ubuntu has to get upstream updates.
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It's not that they don't "support" LTS, it's that they don't "support" it as much as they support the current release. One has "more" support than the other, mostly just through the nature of one having more fixes than the other, the current release is more mature software.
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@stacksofplates said in Issue installing Korora:
@scottalanmiller said in Issue installing Korora:
It's all about the definition of support. They will certainly support getting the product installed. But they are under no known obligation to support problems in the code, even their own code.
So against my arguments before, they don't own the code either. RedHat has an advantage there. They produce Fedora. Ubuntu has to get upstream updates.
Totally true and that could make for a great reason as to why they feel that this is how they should handle it. I'm totally okay with what Canonical does, I'm not saying that their model is bad. Only that we have to understand what it means for us in our context as people supporting it.
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And again, I'm not saying you are lying. It's just saying a company doesn't support what they claim to support (whatever that means in each scenario) is a big thing.
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Here's the support resolution matrix thing:
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I think that vendors like IBM, Oracle, Suse and Red Hat have created a tradition of "we fix it no matter what" and, of course, you pay a hefty premium for that kind of support. But because RHEL support means "we guarantee that it works", a lot of IT pros carry that assumption on to other products. And that's not really fair to those vendors. Especially smaller ones. Those big players have the resources to absorb that risk, Canonical does not.
When Oracle says that they stand behind Solaris for a decade for every customer, they own every line of code and any fix will apply to every customer and even if they get unique customers who are the sole customers hitting a bug, they can afford to fix that because they have so much money that sure, they lose money that one time, but overall they earn plenty. It's a risk that they can take.
Canonical pouring money into one or two customers that hit a rare issue probably doesn't work. Especially when they have a fix, it just requires leaving LTS to get the fix. How silly to spend money fixing the LTS for two customers, when a non-LTS fix is out and tested and ready. Know what I mean?
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Also:
- Hotfixes
To temporarily resolve critical support cases, Canonical may provide a version of the affected software (e.g. package) that applies a patch. Such versions are referred to as “hotfixes”. Hotfixes provided by Canonical are valid until 90 days after the corresponding patch has been incorporated into a release of the software in the Ubuntu Archives. However, if a patch is rejected by the applicable upstream project, the hotfix will be no longer be supported and the case will remain open.
- Hotfixes
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@stacksofplates said in Issue installing Korora:
And again, I'm not saying you are lying. It's just saying a company doesn't support what they claim to support (whatever that means in each scenario) is a big thing.
I agree, but I'm just saying that I don't think that they say that. I don't feel that they are not providing support, just that the support isn't what we had assumed that it would be.
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@stacksofplates said in Issue installing Korora:
Also:
- Hotfixes
To temporarily resolve critical support cases, Canonical may provide a version of the affected software (e.g. package) that applies a patch. Such versions are referred to as “hotfixes”. Hotfixes provided by Canonical are valid until 90 days after the corresponding patch has been incorporated into a release of the software in the Ubuntu Archives. However, if a patch is rejected by the applicable upstream project, the hotfix will be no longer be supported and the case will remain open.
I think this was too big to do that. It was a pretty huge issue.
- Hotfixes
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An important thing to remember is that in the case that I'm talking about as the example.... Canonical absolutely provided a solution. 100% they had a fix. The fix just required "leaving LTS". In no way could we say that Canonical didn't have a fix, and they definitely provided support. And while I didn't test this at the time, I'm 99.999% sure that they would have provided great support for updating to the non-LTS version and all that.
There is no reason that we can't think of "leaving LTS" as a valid fix from the support group. Is there really anything wrong with that being their answer?
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@scottalanmiller could we try to get an official response from Canonical to set there definition clear?
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@Romo said in Issue installing Korora:
@scottalanmiller could we try to get an official response from Canonical to set there definition clear?
I'll tag them, I always do. But they've never responded publicly.
And to some degree, it is probably dependent on your support agreement. I'm betting that they are not all the same.
