Migration to Debian style releases via the APT ecosystem

DevOps RFCs
3

Precis of the Ubuntu mental model for release management

Distribution codenames

  • Names for particular releases of the Ubuntu distribution
  • Examples: trusty, bionic, focal

Distribution releases

Release Version Short Code Name Purpose
16.04 xenial Long term support
18.04 bionic Long term support
19.04 disco Interim release
19.10 eoan Interim release
20.04 focal Long term support
  • Long term suport (LTS) releases are published every 2 years
    • They get hardware and maintenance updates for ~2 years after that
    • They get maintenance updates for the next ~2 years
    • They get extended security maintenance for the next ~4 years after that
  • Interim releases are published every six months and only supported for 9 months

A single repository is exposed for all releases, and APT components are used to delineate
slices according to Ubuntu release version: deb <base_uri>/ubuntu/ {component} ...

In addition, the first “component” is used to denote different release channels:

  • The general pattern is:
    • <short_code_name>
    • <short_code_name>-updates
    • <short_code_name>-backports
    • <short_code_name>-security
  • For example, for the xenial release:
    • xenial
    • xenial-updates
    • xenial-backports
    • xenial-security

Reference Material

More information can be found here: