[bboozzoo]

Canonical directly maintains only a handful of snaps, and even so it's up to the individual teams to do the relevant QA before publishing a version to the stable.

You'd expect that publishers follow the same process, that a stable channel means it's really stable, whereas version breaking changes really end up in per version channel. Ideally you have the latest/{stable,beta,candidate,edge} which follows the latest version of the software, and eg. v1/{stable,beta,candidate,edge}, v2/{stable,beta,candidate,edge}, v3/{stable,beta,candidate,edge} for individual version. A simple concept but surprisingly hard to follow.

Maybe the publishers are really lazy and don't care about the users or the maintenance cost of keeping n versions around is just too high, in which case it's up to the users to make their effort worth it.

[vladvasiliu]

I agree with your point, but the issue discussed here is being forced into updating. Sure, that's an issue because some people aren't fully confident that a "minor update" won't break things. They may or may not be right, but that's a separate debate.

The point is that people want to be able to disable automatic updates, even minor ones, and that's not possible.

edit: I can see how my previous comment could have been confusing. To clear it up, I was trying to say that a workaround for the forced updates would be for vendors to publish a "single version channel". So version 1.2.3 would be a dedicated channel, with no updates ever. Version 1.2.4 would be a separate channel, with only that single version. This would of course be impractical, for both the vendor and the user.