Comment 129 for bug 263555

On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 10:53:21AM -0000, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> Indeed the alpha release should have been replaced in a hurry by a new
> release with the module blacklisted. What I see from "outside" is that
> the burocratic need to release images only at established dates is
> preventing a well known practice - release a fixed iso in a hurry - to
> happen.

This is not "bureaucratic". A working milestone image can't be produced at
random, it takes approximately a week to prepare and validate a set of
images and we can only muster one of these once every two weeks (at best).
Doing a new alpha release right would have meant deferring the beta; doing
it wrong is no better than just deleting the images, since there's no
guarantee they'll work.

This does not mean that the Ubuntu developers don't care about the integrity
of testers' hardware (and I would appreciate it if the various apologists,
who are not Ubuntu developers, would stop claiming that users should expect
the possibility of hardware damage). However, the alpha milestones are
targeted at testers who are part of the development community, they're not
intended for general consumption - people using these images should be
subscribed to ubuntu-devel-announce, where notice of the problem has been
posted, so making the alpha images unavailable for download is really not
warranted and would only hinder getting necessary feedback from users who
don't have the affected hardware.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
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