Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread.
The Ubuntu ISO Tracker has long been used by the Ubuntu QA team and the community for tracking the Ubuntu Linux ISOs and their pass/fail results and other build/testing related information. But as Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta explained this morning in a public post, it’s showing its age:
“It has grown increasingly unreliable, difficult to maintain, and nearly impossible to deploy in modern environments (read as: charms). For Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, we propose to release without the ISO Tracker entirely.
…
The ISO Tracker is an aging PHP/Drupal application built more than a decade ago and held together with duct tape and goodwill. It has accumulated years of technical debt, database hotfixes, and code rot that make deployment and maintenance increasingly hard.We had initially planned to “charm” the ISO Tracker to modernize its hosting and reduce manual maintenance. However, this turned out to be a significant engineering challenge:
– The ISO tracker codebase is outdated and poorly modularized.
– The database is brittle and prone to failure.
– Charming and redeploying it would require a near rewrite of large sections of code and schema handling.Given these realities, continuing to rely on the ISO Tracker was no longer a sustainable option. We have therefore decided to take a more decisive step: release Ubuntu 26.04 LTS without it.”
Even with Ubuntu 26.04 being an important Long Term Support (LTS) release, they are looking to go without using this long-used tool.
They eventually want a workflow built around their forthcoming Test Observer, Jenkins, and lightweight manual aggregation tools. But for now the immediate approach is to use a temporary shared spreadsheet/dashboard, Ubuntu release management maintaining a testing coordination tread on Discourse, and then to eventually have new tooling in place.
Those interested in the plans to phase out Ubuntu ISO Tracker usage moving forward can find the details posted a few minutes ago on Ubuntu Discourse.
