This is a call to *all* users of LAVA on Trusty - please let us know who you are, what you're needs are and whether you are able to migrate to Debian Jessie instead of going from Trusty 14.04LTS to Xenial Xerus 16.04LTS.

If you are using LAVA on any release of Ubuntu older than Trusty, the only advice from the LAVA team is to immediately migrate to Debian Jessie.

If you are using LAVA on Wily Werewolf or Vivid Vervet, you should also consider testing the migration to Xenial and comparing with a migration to Debian Jessie, as below.

LAVA is looking at a fix for the 2015.9 release but Django1.9 is in beta release already. There are issues with django1.8 which are in development. Currently, we are proposing that this update will be applied to 2015.9 and made into a frozen release.

The master branch of LAVA will continue to develop and will need to use more features only available in Django1.7 and later. Documentation relating to installing Trusty would then be deprecated and removed in subsequent releases from the master branch. Equally, future database migrations on the master branch would no longer provide south support, using the django migration support provided by django1.7 and later. So these releases would not be built for Trusty - leaving only the frozen branch.

Due to the complexity of supporting django1.6, it is unlikely that updates will be available for the frozen branch once this happens..

The changes in the lava-server due to the ongoing refactoring will mean that users of Trusty will be unable to migrate to pipeline support until the server has also been migrated to Xenial 16.04LTS.

In addition to this, there is concern that migrating from Trusty and django1.6 all the way to django1.8 or possibly django1.9 in Ubuntu Xenial 16.04LTS is going to be problematic and the LAVA team will be unable to assist in most cases.

The alternative is for someone with a reasonably complex lab running Ubuntu to take up a role as tester of the frozen branch *and* responsibility for patches which can maintain trusty support and migration to Xenial 16.04LTS. The problem then will be that it will be a very large transition when 16.04LTS actually becomes available - only for the same lag to start all over again.

I'm unsure when Xenial will close the window for migrations from Debian into Xenial - I expect that the 2015.12 release of LAVA will migrate, I expect that 2016.1 will migrate too but I cannot be sure about 2016.2 or 2016.3. That migration is completely outside the control of the LAVA software team.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/+source/lava-server

Everyone considering staying on Ubuntu is advised to try a migration to Xenial *now* - in a VM, with and without a recent backup of your database and logs. Xenial currently has 2015.11. Also compare with a migration to Debian Jessie by dumping and reimporting the database. In each case, ensure that the permissions on /var/lib/lava-server and sub-directories are retained from the original.

Please talk to us and test out what you are going to do.

https://validation.linaro.org/static/docs/support.html