It's hard to make an informed decision without knowing the usage stats of Wubi. If it's quite low then I expect there'd be little impact, but if it's popular then it's taking a low-risk installation method away from users who might otherwise not have tried Ubuntu. Does Canonical have any statistics on this?
Re. the bugs. I had a look at "Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64 ISO" https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770 and found that the fix is a one-liner configuration file change (in data/isolist.ini).
The fix for "13.04 installer doesn't create user account" https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704 could be to simply remove the disk-image installs from 13.04. This again is a two line removal from the same configuration file.
I've patched and tested both 12.04.2 and 13.04 with these changes to confirm they work.
Re. Windows 8: that may not be solvable right now, but I expect there are still many more BIOS-based computers out there than UEFI. And the regular dual boot for UEFI has many problems as well. Wubi could probably be smarter about checking whether Windows is booting through UEFI and exit gracefully prior to downloading the ISO/diskimage.
Regards,
bcbc
On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 5:00 AM, <ubuntu-devel-request@lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 12:59:35 -0700
From: Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@ubuntu.com>
To: ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Intention to drop Wubi from 13.04 release
Message-ID: <20130401195935.GA8965@virgil.dodds.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Dear developers,
Recent bug reports suggest that the Ubuntu installer for Windows, Wubi, is
not currently in very good shape for a release:
13.04 installer doesn't create user account
https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1155704
Wubi fails to detect 12.04.2 and 13.04 AMD64 ISO
https://bugs.launchpad.net/wubi/+bug/1134770
Combined with the fact that Wubi has not been updated to work with Windows 8
(bug #1125604), and the focus on mobile client over desktop, the Foundations
team does not expect Wubi to be in a releasable state for 13.04.
I am therefore proposing to drop Wubi from the 13.04 release, starting
immediately with the upcoming Beta. This will save our testers from
spending their time testing an image that will not have developers working
on fixing the bugs they find, and spares our users from using an image for
13.04 that is not up to Ubuntu's standards of quality.
If someone is interested in taking over the maintenance of Wubi so that it
can be released with 13.04 (or if not with 13.04, then with a future
release), I would encourage them to start by looking at the abovementioned
bugs and preparing patches, then talking to the release team.
Thanks,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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