“We can’t afford to take risks with our user’s trust, but I balance that with the need to continue to improve the desktop.”

How can you “balance that”? Does that mean you will “take risks with our user’s trust” when some real cool feature pops up (or come Canonical need drives it)?

I’m not trying to wordsmith you. I appreciate your frankness. Frankness has it’s own risks as everything you say has to be taken at face value. I’ve been bitten on that one myself.

I like ubuntu as a distro and have installed it in several places.

And yet Windows 98 had blue screens of death often, (without an update available that I could ever see that fixed this problem) and people accepted it for how many years? I didn’t see a death sentence there, just more sardines lining up to buy an operating system that crashed often.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=257459 refers to the nVidia breakage caused by USN-346-1

The comments on Malone (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/60433) cause concern as it looks like no-one checked the patch before it went out.

As broken security patches cause more problems than the exploits they are designed to fix (and this has happened TWICE in a month) we seem to have a problem.

I don’t expect developers to release 100% perfect patches (they are as human as the rest of us) but we need to have another pair of eyes looking over patches like this. Kernel patches signed off by two members of the core development team? Patches being installed successfully on our supported architectures before being released in the wild?

The current setup appears bugged in any case..

I’m not sure that static software in release editions is the answer, but stable software in release editions certainly is. I say don’t add new versions into release editions unless the only realistically perceivable changes are pleasing to 99.99% of users… I say bug test like your life depends on it and don’t release updates that force users to change the way they’re used to doing things.

Mark Shuttleworth:

Releasing poorly tested updates for a ’stable’ release is inexcusable.

Pragmatic Linux enthusiasts [like myself] will hesitate to recommend and use an OS in any professional capacity if it is undependable. These ‘mishaps’ scare off new users and push away the fringe of the current user base.

In the hierarchy of development demands, a policy to deliver and maintain flawless internal stability to users who require it must trump other concerns, even in virtually all security situations. For example, MS is notoriously slow in patching vulnerabilities, but to the average user that’s not half as bad as faulty updates. If you promise stability and deliver less, people get incredibly pissed, especially when there is nobody to blame but the source, and especially when that source is already struggling to build a reputation in the areas of usability, trust, and practicality.

Faulty updates are a death sentence for Ubuntu.

http://kubuntu.org/announcements/amarok-1.4.3.php

People need to chill, read, and chill some more, because chilling is good.. There’s also ubuntuforums.org to vent frustrations rather than cluttering a nice blog with such tripe.

“Don’t add new versions into released editions of Kubuntu”

If you don’t want new versions of software, then by all means don’t upgrade, the choice is yours. All software has the potential for bugs, holding back new versions from everyone so they have to compile from source to get to the next version is not my idea of linux for human beings.

With today’s updates I find Amorok is now 1.4.2 and
sorely broken, no flak, collections gone, who knows what
else.

You gotta stop this… You say 6.6 is Long Term Support, then support it, stop changing it.

Don’t add new versions into released editions of Kubuntu. Only security patches, maybe bug fixes, but not when some package has a rewrite. You’re using a million desktops as your final test.

You gotta have a standard ability to install older, known working,
versions, without the need for humans at the server to uninstall a bad upgrade. Adept doesn’t let me back off 1.4.2 and go back,
to, say 1.3.X…

Phil

[MarkShuttleworth:  I think you have enabled dapper-backports on your system, which says you *want* to get newer versions of stuff from Edgy, compiled for Dapper, installed on your system.]