MicroReleaseException for Banshee SRUs

[Bertrand Lorentz]

Hello everyone

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 8:46 PM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello all
>
> Bertrand Lorentz [2011-06-13 16:05 +0200]:
>> To document our policy for our stable branch, I've just created the
>> following wiki page :
>> https://live.gnome.org/Banshee/StableReleasesPolicy
>
> Thanks Bertrand for getting this written.
>
> I interpret "It changes the user interface beyond what is necessary
> for fixing a bug" to have a rather strict sense. E. g. if a button is
> broken or the text cannot be read, then fixing this is ok (as it
> technically "changes" the UI, but it was really objectively broken
> before), but flipping the arrangement of buttons in a dialog because
> it is more consistent would't, as this is debatable, breaks people's
> muscle memory, etc. Is that how you usually handle this?

Yes, your examples correspond to what I had in mind, and I think they
match the way we've done it in the past.

>> The "testing process" part still needs some work.
>
> It would be good to have a representative set of different media
> formats (some mp3s, some oggs, aacs, album covers, etc.) which could
> be used as a test case, but the spirit of this sounds good. I'm
> particularly concerned about breaking upgrades and existing
> databases/configurations here.

In fact, we already have a little bit of test data in tests/data (ogg
files, older databases), and it's already used in some unit tests. But
there's definitely room for improvement here.

>> Our release schedule and policy is roughly the same as GNOME, so
>> stable releases have a similar UI/string/feature freeze. See the wiki
>> page linked above.
>
> The policy indeed matches GNOME, and in SRU practice we have accepted
> quite a few GNOME upstream microreleases into SRU. There once was an
> exception for GNOME microreleases for 10.04 LTS, but it got removed
> again as this was only temporary. But the SRU team still accepts them
> as long as they meet the normal SRU policy (which many of them do).
>
> As long as there is someone who will actually execute the testing with
> the -proposed packages, I'm fine with this proposal, so a +1 from me.
> The first couple of updates should be checked more carefully by the
> SRU team (i. e. review the changelog and actual code changes) to get
> more confidence in this.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to seeing our bugfixes available to all
Ubuntu users.

-- 
Bertrand Lorentz