RFC: auto-generated packageset for Canonical OEM enablement metapackages

[Dan Streetman]

Just to follow up, this was discussed at the last DMB meeting, and an
action item added to vote at a following meeting on the specific
details.
https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2020/07/27/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t15:54


On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 6:49 AM Iain Lane <laney at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> 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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