ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Selene Scriven <selene.scriven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* John McAleely <john.mcaleely@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yes, I think each channel does have a separate series of build 
> numbers. Someone from the landing team can confirm, I think.
> 
> > * Do the build numbers ever reset to 1? For example, when
> >   the Ubuntu release changes?
> 
> I believe they can only be at '1' in a channel once.

Yes, each channel has its own build number scheme.  At the moment 
we have 35 public channels per device.  And the channels 
generally change at least every six months with the Ubuntu 
release (though sometimes more often).

So we keep cycling through builds 1 to ~200-ish on every device 
on every channel about twice per year, and the build numbers thus 
mean almost nothing by themselves.  It would be very nice if we 
had a *short* unique identifier for every build, but at the 
moment we do not.

> > 8.  Whether the image is writable or not.
> 
> I notice it is often the first question our support team asks 
> OEM support teams when dealing with referred problem reports.

It's a common expectation that Debian-based systems are writable 
and can use apt-get to add or manage packages.  I know at least, 
for me personally, the very first thing I'd do with an Ubuntu 
phone is make it writable and start installing the programs I 
care about.  But Ubuntu Touch breaks this expectation...  and I'd 
be surprised to find out that this is unintended and not really 
supported.

So of course support needs to know this.  It's very common, and 
having the system suddenly break after an update is surprising 
behavior.  The obvious deduction is "the update broke my phone", 
not "configuring it like a normal Ubuntu computer started the 
countdown on the fail clock".

This will be an ongoing issue until the phones switch to Snappy, 
where apt-get isn't available (or, if things go well, where 
apt-get will live in a special container intended for exactly 
this type of use).


-- Selene