Comment 94 for bug 1214352

I fully agree that rebuilding only a few packages is no suitable general solution. But so is the recommendation to upgrade to 14.04.

There is a reason that corporate environments do not upgrade so often, and even 2 years is a very short time in this context. I have only recently upgraded a few smaller networks from Windows XP to Windows 7, and I am pretty sure these will stick with it until 2020. Thats why we highly appreciated the announcement that Ubuntu 12.04 would get 5 years of LTS support, so we decided to skip 14.04 entirely and target 16.04 as the next upgrade.

We cannot change that plan just because of this bug. It took us several hundreds of hours of manpower to evaluate and test the upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04, and it took the complete lifespan of 10.04 until it was done. We worked out around 50 fixes and workarounds for all sorts of weird bugs and shortcomings which are still not fixed, and I cannot count how often I have read that this and that bug will not be fixed in the current version, despite it being an LTS release. Just two recent examples, #949468 and #886327. They're both not as critical as this one, but still annoying.

We are a non-profit and as such cannot afford paid support like RHEL or SuSE Enterprise. We decided to try and contribute back instead, wherever we can. I still feel comfortable with that. But sometimes I get frustrated because it seems that some people behind Ubuntu think a shiny new tablet running Ubuntu is more important than people being able to get their work done.

I would be happy to help testing if you decided to go the hard way and rebuild the rdeps.