Migration from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without notification

I just spent a while on the phone to a customer trying to work out why our Electron app no longer works on Debian 8. After spending the time getting a Jessie system up and running to test myself, I find that this is due to:

GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by /tmp/.org.chromium.Chromium.3r2Ly1)

For at least the last 18 months we have specifically built on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS over anything newer so that our native node modules are supported on the widest range of distros. We require this to support Debian 8 and RHEL7.

I don’t mind that you’ve discontinued the hosting of 14.04, after all you have a business to run and I doubt many were using it. I also know we can probably get this working again via docker and the 10+ minutes it will add to our builds.

What I’m most disappointed by is the automatic migration of our builds to the 16.04 stack without so much as an email or warning. We would have preferred that our builds started failing over forcing a stack change without telling us.

I hope you’ll consider this before silently migrating customers in the future!

Hi @meatysolutions,

First of all sorry for the inconvenience, I definitely see your point. Based on our internal discussion we plan to adapt a new update policy for the Linux/Android stacks, similar to the Xcode ones:

In this specific case it would have looked like this:

  1. We add the new Ubuntu 18 stack, in addition to the existing Ubuntu 16 and Ubuntu 14 stacks
  2. Then we deprecate the Ubuntu 14 stack, but keep it available for a while. Send notifications & publish the deprecation so that users can prepare.
  3. Finally, remove the Ubuntu 14 stack.

We plan to adapt this update policy for the Linux stacks at the next time we do an Ubuntu upgrade, in about 2 years.

Once again sorry for the inconvenience, we’re doing our best to avoid a breaking change like this in the future.

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