schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Both SchoolTool 1.2 (we're just going to use traditional release
numbering going forward, btw), and Ubuntu 2009.10 are due out next
week.

In the past, when we've created a new version, we've updated all the
packages for the previous releases of Ubuntu.  If you're running
Intrepid and you apt-get install SchoolTool, you get the latest
version, not the one released for Intrepid.  This particularly made
sense since earlier versions of SchoolTool were essentially alphas and
betas, and people shouldn't have been continuing to use them as more
stable releases came out.

Going forward, we need to stabilize the process, both because people
won't want their production SchoolTool deployments unexpectedly
updating to major new releases, and because as we move to being
included in Ubuntu proper for Lucid Lynx, we've got to substantially
rearrange the underlying packaging.

So... this is all subject to change depending on what actually works, but...

SchoolTool 1.2 will probably only be packaged (by us) for Ubuntu 2009.10.
SchoolTool 1.4 will probably only be packaged (by us) for Ubuntu 2010.4

This leaves out the possibility of anyone else making packages for
other versions, distros or OS's which anyone can do with some time and
expertise.  We're not going to do it because maintaining two or three
differently organized versions of the same releases would be
prohibitively time consuming and insanity inducing.

What will this mean, in practice?

When we release SchoolTool 1.2, you'll only get it if you upgrade the
host system to Karmic -- Ubuntu 2009.10.
When we release SchoolTool 1.4, you'll only get it if you upgrade the
host system to Lucid -- Ubuntu 2010.4

Again, this is probably the desired behavior anyhow -- you don't want
"apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" to deliver a major revision with
significant UI changes in the middle of the school year.

The main case where this will cause some difficulty is if you're
running SchoolTool on a server that has lots of other things going on
for which you want to stay on an earlier version of Ubuntu, or if for
some reason you only support an earlier version of Ubuntu.

In either case, I'd recommend moving SchoolTool to a separate virtual machine.

If you have comments, now would be a good time to air them...

--Tom