Looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
13.04 will reach EOL in January 2014, while 12.10 will reach EOL in April 2014, therefore if a 12.10 user hasn't upgraded to 13.04 and subsequently to 13.10, there will be a 3 month period where a 12.10 user has a supported version of Ubuntu, but will be unable to upgrade.
I asked this question a number of months ago and the suggestion was that the hope was that there would be an upgrade path from 12.10 to 14.04.
Could somebody confirm whether this is still the case, or if not what the plans are for 12.10 users after 13.04 becomes EOL.
Edited for clarification
The particular issue I was concerned about is that once 13.04 goes EOL, a 12.10 user would in theory lose the ability to upgrade once the 13.04 repo's are removed from the normal release repository. Using the old releases method would be a way around the issue, however would make it more complicated for a less experienced user.
An alternative could be for the 13.04 repo's to be left available for the 3 month interim period so that a 12.10 version could still be upgraded to 13.04 and subsequently onto 13.10, however that doesn't seem an optimal solution in that users may consider that it meant that support for 13.04 was being continued.
If a direct upgrade from 12.10 to 14.04 was to made available, this would only be available once 14.04 was released and still leaves the issue of the 3 months between January and April 2014 were there may be some confusion.
I suspect that its not going to affect a significant number of users, if somebody has upgraded from 12.04LTS to 12.10, in all probability, they'll have continued to upgrade to 13.04 and upwards because they'd made the choice to use current rather than LTS releases.
It would just be useful to have some clarification of the situation which people can be referred to in advance of 13.04 going EOL rather than hitting the cut off point and it being too late for users to make the decision and being left in limbo.
Best Answer
Yes, just as upgrades from LTS to LTS are supported, upgrades from an intermediate release to the next LTS are supported.
Historically this is only supported by manually changing your apt sources, since update-manager / do-release-upgrade require you to go step by step.
But since 13.04 will go end of life before 12.10, we will need to skip over 13.04 in the upgrade path. This will be implemented on the server (and with an SRU of the update-manager package to 12.10) to show the direct upgrade as an available option.