Ubuntu Update Undermines UI

When applied to Ubuntu 6.06, the patch inadvertently breaks the desktop windowing environment on some systems. When we learned of the problem, the patch was immediately withdrawn. Mirrors have also been disabled to ensure that the faulty patch isn't available from them.

As a team we made a series of errors, and the result was a desktop that was broken for thousands of users, for several hours. It has been a severe lesson in QA, something Luis knows plenty about.

An incident report is being compiled by the team and we will publish that for our broader community and users as soon as it is complete. My apologies to those who have been affected...

If there is a silver lining to the error, it is that it happened during the one week in six months when we have the core distribution development team together in one place. This gave us the opportunity not just to analyse and fix the issue, and to talk about the sequence of events that led to the problem, but also to discuss the processes we must improve to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat.