Hacker News Reader

Comment by npongratz | Hacker News Reader

> GitHub Enterprise now utilizes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS...

I'm curious, why is this new release based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS rather than 14.04 LTS?

I'm mainly interested in the thought process behind this choice, I don't have an opinion about it.

14.04 is too new. They probably started working on this long before 14.04 was finalized, and retooling would be expensive and slow them down. And even then, 14.04 is still rough around the edges--not all of the kinks have been discovered or fixed yet. 12.04 still has over three years of life left in it, which is much longer than the probable lifetime of GHE 2.0, and a future release of GHE can upgrade to 14.04 if and when that's necessary/beneficial.

Right on, but tiny correction - 12.04 has over two years of life left, not three.

So a stable release is too unstable for them? And now the first thing users will have to do is after install, apply all the bug fix packages to bring it to 14.04. But that will bring no unstability concerns? Or will they just not patch it and expose themselves to the bugs in the name of stability?

That's incorrect. The way you apply bug fixes to 12.04 LTS is by installing the bug fixes, not by moving to 14.04. The whole point is that 12.04 LTS continues to get updates for 5 years.

It's not that it's unstable in an absolute sense – but it is a migration if they started building this prior to 14.04 release (highly likely). And migrations are always time-consuming and risky, even if it's a migration to an otherwise stable platform.

We're running 12.04 on github.com so made sense to sync them up.

Why Ubuntu over Debian, out of curiosity? I've seen Spotify switch from Debian to Ubuntu and regretting it already.

I was part of the Ubuntu decision at GitHub, and it was based on the fact that Ubuntu gave you much longer support after the next release. Debian (at the time) only guaranteed even security updates on previous releases for one year after a new release.

Just wondering, not an attack: did you talk to the Debian project to see what resources (money or person-time) are needed to support a Debian release for a longer time?

I am asking, because Debian is a community project and in the end it gives what its community members are putting in. I am wondering about the amount of effort necessary.

It seems that they estimate it at one person, full time [1]. Which does not seem a lot, given the number of organizations that use Debian.

[1] http://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html

Why would they talk to anybody? Support decisions were already made (for a reason) for both releases. Trying to revise them and committing on '?' for an array of production servers is a horrible idea.

Exactly this. It would have seemed pretty presumptuous to ask the Debian project to change the support model that they decided worked for them to support us.

We were also faced with a very large new infrastructure build and we knew we were at the end of the line with Squeeze but Wheezy had't quite yet shipped, which put us in an awkward position.

Debian is a great distribution, but at the time we felt like Ubuntu was the right way to go given the existing support policies.

When I made the decision for my shop, we chose Ubuntu because of the guaranteed support cycle. Debian's support windows were too short, and we need to be able to plan years ahead of time for when we must spend the time to upgrade the OS. It takes a lot of testing and tweaking, and Debian didn't give us any certainty beyond a few months out. Ubuntu gives us a five year guarantee (and they've been sticking to that for six years now). That allows us to be a lot more confident about making plans for the next year or two.

> Debian didn't give us any certainty beyond a few months out.

Actually, now they do: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Not even close: "Debian-LTS will not be handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success (with some overlap in people involved)."

How is this different? Unless you know the security team personally, how does it matter which people does the job? It is still officially a Debian project, backed by those volunteers who does the job.

Because Debian doesn't provide enterprise support. Let say that you've got a critical bug somewhere, do you really think you can tell your boss 'Yeah I asked on IRC / forums / mailing list to get an ETA'

One problem with that is that Ubuntu is actually quite limited. As soon as you enable universe you're out of support.

Luckily there are many small consulting companies out there which can happily support both Debian and Ubuntu!

Source?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com