4 ms·
One of the most confusing parts about this switch, to me, was that it immediately precedes an LTS release. Why would you spring experimental changes right befo
by jfager 17y ago
One of the most confusing parts about this switch, to me, was that it immediately precedes an LTS release. Why would you spring experimental changes right before the release you're calling 'stable' and committing to for 5 years? I was under the impression that LTS was supposed to be the distillation of all the new features that were embraced or rejected during the wild and crazy intermediate releases.
The actual change isn't that big of a deal. It's pretty easy to fix, and it would have been fine in a minor release with plenty of lead time before it became 'official', just to try it out. The big deal is that this reveals a broken management and release process, and comes across as a serious trust breaker.
- SwellJoe 17y agoUbuntu has a long history of making dumb little changes without warning and then committing to them against all reason. I don't know if they've fixed it yet, or not, but my favorite is when they broke the Apache configuration file by adding shell variables to it (thus making it it unparse-able by everything other than Ubuntu scripts; the Apache standard tools can't parse the Ubuntu configuration file without pre-processing, for an example of how absurd this decision was). All this breakage was caused just because someone was too lazy to parse out a few different types of variables from the existing configuration file syntax (I looked it up, and the comment about this in the changelog was that parsing it wasn't possible; despite the fact that numerous, probably hundreds, of applications and scripts do parse it correctly). The Ubuntu developer culture of superiority and self-importance is quite trying at times.