Hello everyone,
tl;dr - As there were some unexpected complications during the preparation of our HWE 5.19 kernels for jammy, and with shim 15.7 making its way to the archive, we decided that more time is necessary to get everything ready. We decided to move the 22.04.2 release date to February 23.
Every .2 point-release we are providing HWE kernels for the given series [1]. For 22.04 those were to be the kinetic 5.19 kernel, and per the schedule that is always done a bit earlier than the point-release itself. However, the enablement proved to be a bit more challenging due to some unforeseen compiler and dkms issues. This made things take longer than expected, and we think more time is needed to perform the necessary testing of the new kernel.
At the same time, we only recently got the new shim (15.7) ready for upload. As this version revokes all currently used keys, this requires a lot of work to get things right so that existing installations continue working as expected. It also requires us to rebuild all the kernels that would be going to the point-release.
The extra two weeks should give us more time to prepare and polish everything before starting spinning 22.04.2. With this delay, the expected release date of 22.04.2 is now February 23.
As a regular user of 22.04, am I affected?
Not at all. Point releases are done periodically to refresh the installer media, so that users that download images from ubuntu.com and want to perform a fresh installation of Ubuntu get the latest updates without having to download them from the internet afterwards.