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End of canonical support

Asked by Phil Norisez

What does "Canonical provides critical updates for something until April 2012" mean? To me, this is a red-flag that I shouldn't use the something it refers to, since support is about to be dropped. If that's not what it means, who or what picks up support, and how do I get their updates?

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Jacobsallan (jacobsallan) said : 		#1

It means what it says...it's a commitment by Canonical to maintain the version of the software until April 2012. This is actually an instance of the highest grade of service that Canonical provides, not the lowest. See: http://osdir.com/ml/ubuntu-bugs/2011-06/msg20646.html which discuses Bug 789596. ""Canonical doesn't provide updates" is a scary message, especially for customers - msg#20646".

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Phil Norisez (norisezp) said : 		#2

I want to thank Jacobsallan for the response. The bug report and discussion answers the first question. However, the second is still not answered, as there is no way to determine who to go to for help, not to say support, on a particular package. Are the suggestions in the discussion actually being implemented? What is the priority? Is there any time frame in which action can be expected? These questions are most important. Please understand, I know that a large amount of this is done part-time by volunteers, so I do not expect anything approaching the level of support that I would from, say, an Adobe product on MS Windows. However, I think that the Ubuntu/Canonical model needs to take the commercial OS/application relationship into account, if they ever expect acceptance as a viable alternative to the commercial offerings. Perhaps packages should be removed from the official Ubuntu repository when no longer updated or supported by anyone. That would, at least, make questions such as mine moot.

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Phil Norisez (norisezp) said : 		#3

In addition, I would recommend that any readers that agree with the assertion that this is a bug, go to the bug report and click the link that says "Does this bug apply to you?" in order to up the count.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#4

Not officially supported package may be moved to 'universe' repo,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu
e.g. Synaptic,
http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/synaptic
which are still maintained by community, e.g. upstream from Debian, and also bug reports can be filed.

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