Comment 14 for bug 1497024

Mathew - that's an interesting idea I had not considered. It makes sense if we are skipping versions for stable releases to also skip versions for development releases. Having said that though, the code in update-manager parses the meta-release files to determine which release to upgrade. As an example here is the meta-release-development entry for utopic.

Dist: utopic
Name: Utopic Unicorn
Version: 14.10
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:10:00 UTC
Supported: 0
Description: This is the 14.10 release
Release-File: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/utopic/Release
ReleaseNotes: http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/EOLReleaseAnnouncement
UpgradeTool: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/utopic/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/utopic.tar.gz
UpgradeToolSignature: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/utopic/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/utopic.tar.gz.gpg

We currently just check the date and supported status to determine to which release to upgrade, as the meta release files don't really contain information about whether or not a release is obsolete. Thinking about it more though, if we are running with the -d switch we could check to see if the release date is greater than today. There should probably be a fudge factor of a day though as otherwise people may not be able to upgrade on release day.