CouchDB SRU exception

[John Rowland Lenton]

Resending, not sure what went wrong.

On the behalf of the Ubuntu One team, and of everybody else using
CouchDB on 10.04, I'm asking for an SRU exception for couchdb itself.

The couchdb package currently in 10.04 is version 0.10, which is unable
to interoperate with version 1.0 and later; this includes not only our
cloud servers but also those of CouchIO (the creators of CouchDB) and
anybody running CouchDB in Ubuntu 10.10 and beyond.

The changes from 0.10 to 0.11 and 1.0 include several security fixes,
which alone would warrant the request; unfortunately the changes between
these releases have been significant enough that isolating and then
maintaining the fixes for these issues is unpractical.

As CouchDB is an Apache project, the 1.0 release means that we shouldn't
need to worry about this kind of change happening during the rest of the
10.04 timeframe -- if there are security issues, the fixes will be
isolated; further, they will not break replication.

We went ahead and put together a test plan to exercise multiple upgrade
paths against all common CouchDB enabled applications. Everything worked
as expected, including moving a home directory that had upgraded
databases to a non-upgraded machine: there's an error in reading the
data until CouchDB is upgraded, at which point everything resumes
working as expected.

The testing we did is documented here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/CouchDBSRU


Thank you,