Hi All,
With 12.04.4 having just released, I wanted to propose the idea of having a 12.04.5 point release for Precise.
As many are aware, recent 12.04.x point releases have shipped with a newer kernel and X stack by default for hardware enablement purposes. Maintainers of these enablement stacks have agreed to support these until a Trusty based enablement stack is supported in Precise. Once a Trusty enablement stack is supported, all previous enablement stacks would EOL and be asked to migrate to the final Trusty based enablement stack which would continue to be supported for the remaining life of Precise.
Currently, 12.04.4 is our final point release for Precise. 12.04.4 shipped with a Saucy enablement stack by default. This Saucy enablement stack in Precise will eventually EOL in favor of the Trusty enablement stack. Once that happens, our final point release for Precise will be delivering an EOL'd enablement stack. This seems unfortunate and inappropriate. I would like to propose having a 5th point release for Precise which would deliver the Trusty enablement stack for Precise.
Providing a 12.04.5 point release will add no additional maintenance burden upon teams supporting enablement stacks in Precise. It would require some extra effort on part of the Canonical Foundations Team as well as the Ubuntu Release Team to spin up an additional set of images and testing coordination etc. However, I informally discussed this with a few members of each of those teams and the tentative agreement was that 12.04.5 was a reasonable request which could be accommodated. Collectively we could find no compelling reason to not provide 12.04.5. We also discussed that a 12.04.5 release should be optional for the Flavors to participate in. Additionally, we would want to purposely avoid clashing the 14.04.1 and 12.04.5 release dates and would suggest releasing 14.04.1 first and 12.04.5 after (exact date TBD).
What are other's thoughts here? Does anyone have a compelling reason for not providing a 12.04.5 point release?
Thanks,
Leann
