[Jaunty] Updating every seven days is inimical to the process of turning a beta system into a production system.

[C. Cooke]

Binary package hint: update-manager

On Jaunty, the new update manager policy is to start the update-manager no more often than every seven days. Regardless of viewpoints on this currently very contentious issue, the prompt period should be much shorter while active development and bug fixing are expected on the release.

Because of this policy, I have not been able to submit any crash reports for two weeks due to outdated packages; by the time a bug happens, I no longer have the latest versions of some package and the bug report tool refuses to let me submit. With the previous system, which informed the user whenever there were updates, this was a very rare occurrence. It is now constant.

Perhaps - until release only - we could have a more frequent check?

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

I have subscribed the design team for input on this.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Originally the interval was supposed to be two days in the pre-release period, and seven days in the post-release period. It was changed to seven days for both, on the grounds that a large proportion of alpha/beta testers will be updating manually. I have no idea what proportion that's actually true for: if it's a low proportion, it would make sense to change the pre-release interval back to two days.

[C. Cooke (ccooke)]

Thanks for commenting. I realise I submitted this a little late for Jaunty, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider, especially for Karmic.

It all boils down to what most of the people using pre-release Ubuntu distributions are doing. Some of them are, of course, going to be very proactive about testing and bug reporting and running updates manually multiple times a day. I've been in that group before and doubtless will be again; it all depends on how much time I can spare. For this release, I'm in the other group: I want to submit bugs and get testing done, but I don't currently have a lot of time to dedicate to it. So I installed Jaunty as soon as it was stable enough not to be unusable (on my primary laptop, but only after the secondary system was fully synced and ready just in case) and started using it. I've kept this system updated manually roughly every three to four days, but that's not been often enough to submit decent bugs for some of the problems I've had. I'd be very surprised if I were alone in doing this. It sounds like you don't actually know the figures yourself - which would suggest that the *safest* option is the shorter period.