Comment 29 for bug 539814

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 21:57:51 -0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:35:49PM -0000, Nathan Stratton Treadway
> > where that does happen. I wonder if there is any chance the Ubuntu
> > project could come up with some "policy" regarding support for those
> > situations (for Maverick, obviously).
>
> I don't believe this is likely to happen, fwiw; we can certainly have the
> discussion, but supporting two-year-old kernels for LTS upgrade purposes
> already requires ongoing work, and I don't believe we're ever going to be
> able to support running the Ubuntu userspace on an arbitrary non-Ubuntu
> kernel except on a best-effort basis (like in this case).

I don't think anyone would expect support for arbitrary kernel
versions, but perhaps the outcome of such a discussion would be
to pick specific "outside of the current release" versions for
some level of support.

(For example, supporting 2.6.18 because so many Xen hosts are
currently tied to that version, or supporting chroot installs
under old Ubuntu releases going back some number of releases,
etc.)

Also, there is some middle ground between "supported" as in "we
guarantee everything will work on this kernel version" and
"unsupported". Something like "we'll try to keep things working
on this Linux kernel unless there is a good reason not to, and
if we can't we'll be sure to warn you" might be perfectly
appropriate for this type of usage.

> > Perhaps a compromise would be to add a one-line paragraph saying
> > something like "Users who would like to run Lucid using a kernel older
> > than 2.6.24 should see <ThisPage>", pointing to a page somewhere under
> > help.ubuntu.com or wiki.ubuntu.com. [Using "2.6.24" because that was
> > the version in Hardy.]
[...]
> Under the circumstances, perhaps it's better to simply use the release notes
> to warn users off of upgrading to 10.04 until these issues are fixed, and
> focus on getting these SRUs done?

I'll leave it to you to decide if it's easier to just write a
release note that specifically mentions these bugs (e.g. LP:
#539814 and LP: #552816), or to do a generic note that points to
a Wiki page. The former is a little more streamlined, though
the latter would allow users who discover other
running-on-older-kernel issues to add them to the list later.

Either way, the point is just to get some warning in front of
people before they start an upgrade and then discover that their
system/installation is broken....

      Nathan