Quantal -> Raring -> Saucy upgrade path, how?

Question

Recently in chat we noticed some kind of oddity about the whole 12.10 > 13.04 > 13.10 upgrade path, where Raring will reach EOL before Quantal and how that will play out for us and for the users upgrading. Here is the response:

While raring with be EOL and stop receiving updates before quantal is in the same boat, I don't anticipate removing raring from the mirrors until after quantal's EOL, to avoid any serious issues for people who try to do the release hop from Q-R-S-T.

From here we can infer two things:

1. Raring will be EOL and Quantal not. Per our FAQ, Raring questions should be closed and push users to upgrade. Quantal is supported and on topic until April 2014.
2. There shouldn't be any questions about changing domains to old-releases while using/upgrading Raring, which is a relief.

We should also be working on making sure that Q-T (bypassing R and S) upgrade paths work, and be pushing users (via update-manager hints) toward that direction.

... Adam

Fear my dear comrads... apparently the upgrade team plans to allow users to jump releases (I remember a question that says that you can't) for one time only. I would expect some questions about problems while doing this... oh well.

Then I received another mail with more information about the whole jumping releases:

We should also be working on making sure that Q-T (bypassing R and S) upgrade paths work, and be pushing users (via update-manager hints) toward that direction.

That's in fact what we discsussed in the upgrade testing UDS session. We need to make the five times more complicated [1] P → T upgrade work anyway, this should almost automatically provide a working Q → T path (we'll explicitly test this as well, of course).

Martin

[1] due to all those 12.04.* LTS enablement stacks

I don't have comments about that.

Answer 1

Final response:

This question came up a while ago on Ask Ubuntu, and Jorge asked me to help respond to it:

How will people upgrade from 12.10 to later releases after 13.04 is EOL?

I've just tuned the answer there to make it clearer that this method will be used and supported for upgrades from 12.10.

As Brian mentions, we can't really go straight from 12.10 to 14.04 because 13.04 goes EOL in January, and upgrades to 14.04 are only supported starting in April - so while users of 12.10 will have security support until April, they would also be completely unable to upgrade through the UI from January until April and we don't want any remaining 12.10 users to have to scramble to upgrade the very day that 14.04 is released. So instead the supported upgrade path will be 12.10->13.10->14.04, starting from January.

Hope that helps,

So, this will be one time thingy. We could expect quirks in the upgrade... we will see.