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Looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

13.04 will reach EOL in January 2014, while 12.10 will reach EOL in April 2014, therefore if a 12.10 user hasn't upgraded to 13.04 and subsequently to 13.10, there will be a 3 month period where a 12.10 user has a supported version of Ubuntu, but will be unable to upgrade.

I asked this question a number of months ago and the suggestion was that the hope was that there would be an upgrade path from 12.10 to 14.04.

Could somebody confirm whether this is still the case, or if not what the plans are for 12.10 users after 13.04 becomes EOL.

Edited for clarification

The particular issue I was concerned about is that once 13.04 goes EOL, a 12.10 user would in theory lose the ability to upgrade once the 13.04 repo's are removed from the normal release repository. Using the old releases method would be a way around the issue, however would make it more complicated for a less experienced user.

An alternative could be for the 13.04 repo's to be left available for the 3 month interim period so that a 12.10 version could still be upgraded to 13.04 and subsequently onto 13.10, however that doesn't seem an optimal solution in that users may consider that it meant that support for 13.04 was being continued.

If a direct upgrade from 12.10 to 14.04 was to made available, this would only be available once 14.04 was released and still leaves the issue of the 3 months between January and April 2014 were there may be some confusion.

I suspect that its not going to affect a significant number of users, if somebody has upgraded from 12.04LTS to 12.10, in all probability, they'll have continued to upgrade to 13.04 and upwards because they'd made the choice to use current rather than LTS releases.

It would just be useful to have some clarification of the situation which people can be referred to in advance of 13.04 going EOL rather than hitting the cut off point and it being too late for users to make the decision and being left in limbo.

Braiam
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Dave Jones
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1 Answers1

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Yes, just as upgrades from LTS to LTS are supported, upgrades from an intermediate release to the next LTS are supported.

Historically this is only supported by manually changing your apt sources, since update-manager / do-release-upgrade require you to go step by step.

But since 13.04 will go end of life before 12.10, we will need to skip over 13.04 in the upgrade path. This will be implemented on the server (and with an SRU of the update-manager package to 12.10) to show the direct upgrade as an available option.

slangasek
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    Slangasek - is the official Canonical line that you can go from any interim to LTS? Any links to ubuntu-wiki material that shows this official line? – fossfreedom Oct 30 '13 at 09:50
  • Slangasek Do you know if there will be a direct upgrade path in this specific example from 12.10.

    As far as I'm aware, its a one off situation because of the shortening of the lifespan from 13.04 which left 12.10 having the longer lifespan.

    Generally, I know it wouldn't be standard policy to skip releases.

     – Dave Jones Oct 30 '13 at 14:00
  • This was I believe discussed during a Tech Board meeting http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2013/ubuntu-meeting.2013-03-18-21.01.moin.txt - referenced from a Fridge post http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/19/changes-in-ubuntu-releases-decided-by-the-ubuntu-technical-board/ – 23 93 26 35 19 57 3 89 Oct 30 '13 at 17:55
  • Has this been confirmed, "The plan here is to change that, so that a user of Ubuntu 12.10 could directly update to Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 LTS." That was said 18 months ago, but I've not seen anything to confirm it in recent months. If that's the case, that's great, its what I was hoping for, but I'd like to see something that can be referenced to. – Dave Jones Oct 30 '13 at 21:27
  • This is not about an "official Canonical line"; I'm telling you how the code works. If the upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04 works, then per our maintenance policies on deploying quirks in update-manager, the upgrade from 12.10 to 14.04 will also work, as long as this is enabled on the server side. However, this assumes you're using update-manager / do-release-upgrade, which has the quirks included. Normally the only way to do such an upgrade is by manually changing apt sources.list and using apt-get, which is not going to be the same as update-manager and may not work. – slangasek Oct 31 '13 at 19:03
  • Thanks for that, however it still doesn't answer the question.

    Specific question is what are Canonical/Ubuntu's supported plans to enable 12.10 users to upgrade after 13.04 goes EOL.

     – Dave Jones Nov 03 '13 at 18:24
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    I'm not sure why you think this doesn't answer the question. For upgrades from 12.10, the server will be adjusted to ensure an upgrade path is available to a supported release instead of going via 13.04. – slangasek Nov 04 '13 at 19:38
  • slangasek, Thank you for the last answer, the reason I didn't think the previous response answered the question was the line saying "If the upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04 works, then per our maintenance policies on deploying quirks in update-manager, the upgrade from 12.10 to 14.04 will also work, as long as this is enabled on the server side" The "If this is enabled on the server side" left me unsure as to whether this would be enabled or not. Your last reply has has answered the question however. Many thanks for that. – Dave Jones Nov 04 '13 at 20:18
  • I know the correct answer is "don't do it", but what about a user that want to update from 12.10 (supported) to 13.10 (still supported, not LTS?) – Rmano Mar 17 '14 at 15:51