Bazaar backports

[James Westby]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 09:57 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> [let's take this to the list]
> 
> 2009/3/25 Robert Collins <robert.collins at canonical.com>:
> > On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 11:07 +0000, James Westby wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 14:49 +1300, Tim Penhey wrote:
> >> > Hi James,
> >> >
> >> > I'm wondering if you can help with the backport efforts for Bazaar, or if you
> >> > can suggest someone who knows about this type of thing who could help if you
> >> > cannot.
> >>
> >> I could certainly help, it's not difficult to test backports, just time
> >> consuming. I'm pretty busy with other things now though, so I'm not sure
> >> that I could spare the time to work through it.
> >>
> >> Which backports are you interested in?
> 
> bzr, bzrtools, bzr-gtk, bzr-svn, into the reasonably active past
> releases.

"reasonably active past releases" is the thing.

You need to backport a complete set to those releases, with testing
across the board, so each release is a more significant burden.

The PPAs will help with this, as there is already some level of testing.

I would advise against dapper, as the python policy changes make it
much harder to do that (while there are PPA packages it puts more
pressure on the backports team to review the changes), and it's
nearing the end of the first support window.

> To my mind it's quite a stretch to get it into -updates: we can't make
> a minimal patch (for any sensible meaning of the word) to add new
> formats and smartserver operations into the version in hardy.  We
> could ask for a policy exception.  But whatever we do, getting a
> backport would be a good first step, would give some information, and
> maybe it would turn out to be enough.

You might have seen that the Tech Board recently granted an exception
to Landscape to update in old releases, along with some criteria that
other packages would have to meet if they want to get the same 
treatment.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2009-March/000550.html

It doesn't seem like bzr is a good fit for those criteria though.

> > John Ferlito is putting care into the ppa at the moment, perhaps he can
> > do backports too.
> 
> Good idea.  But maybe James could help, not so much in the technical
> side as in shepherding the justification process?

There is no justification process really. The requirements are little 
more than to have a new version in a later release that you want to
backport, that you test it and any reverse dependencies to the 
satisfaction of the backports team, and that the effects of backporting
won't be too large.

Thanks,

James