RFC: auto-generated packageset for Canonical OEM enablement metapackages

[Iain Lane]

Hi,

A few of us at Canonical have recently been working on a project to 
enable people who buy Ubuntu-certified devices to have the "certified 
experience" whether they bought the device with Ubuntu preinstalled or 
installed Ubuntu later.

The way we've designed this is that parts of the installer / live 
environment / etc are able to match the running hardware and install a 
metapackage from the archive, that then goes on to do the necessary 
setup. We have an exception from the MIR team to allow these packages to 
be auto-promoted into main. This page also explains a few more technical 
details about how the packages work (they are rigidly/mechanically 
structured):

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MIRTeam/Exceptions/OEM

We've got a bit of a scaling problem here though. There is *one source 
package per SKU*. The way that Ubuntu's ACLs are set up is that 
membership of the ~motu team /or a matching packageset|PPU permission/ 
is required to be able to upload NEW source packages to the archive. The 
team that develops these packages is not really made up of Ubuntu 
developers, and so currently they are forced to hand over the packages 
to a sponsor who is in ~motu, which is a burden on the sponsors that it 
would be great to be able to relieve soon.

As a first step towards making this self service for that team, I'd like 
to ask the DMB to consider making a packageset for this purpose.  
Initially it'll have no uploaders apart from ~ubuntu-core-dev, so we're 
considering the set itself only right now. (Later on we'll be nudging 
people to apply to you for upload rights.) The Launchpad team tells me 
that packageset permissions can be added if a source package exists 
*anywhere* (i.e. in a PPA), not just in Ubuntu. So there would be a 
script which enumerates a staging PPA and adds packages found there 
which match the glob 'oem-*-meta' to the packageset. Then the eventual 
workflow would be to upload to the staging PPA, wait for the script to 
fix the packageset, and then they can copy/upload the package to devel 
and SRU it to the relevant releases.

The name could be something like canonical-oem-metapackages and the 
description along the lines of:

  Metapackages provided for hardware enablement for Canonical-certified 
  devices. This set is auto-generated by the script found at XXX.  
  Packages which end up in this set must at all times comply with the 
  MIR exception specified in 
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MIRTeam/Exceptions/OEM

Keen to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
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