Readjusting SRU review process

[Martin Pitt]

Steve Langasek [2013-05-24 13:19 -0700]:
> There are definitely times when I have a sense that the SRUs in the queue
> are not the best use of our time.  Every developer has their own idea of
> what's important enough to SRU, and it's difficult as an SRU team member to
> be in the position of arbitrating, and rejecting uploads because /you/ don't
> think they're important.  It's also difficult to actually /know/ what's
> important enough for an SRU when it's sitting in front of you in the queue -
> some of this only shows up in aggregate after the fact, when we see that
> -proposed is full of packages that no one has bothered to verify.

That's actually a very good point. It seems that over time we have
become rather lenient about which kind of fixes we allow as SRUs. My
gut feeling is that the current level is just about right for LTSes,
but especially with the deemphasized role of the non-LTS releases we
should perhaps set the bar much higher again for those?

> We've tried to mitigate this with stricter enforcement of the
> requirements around test cases

Having those is great, but a separate issue from the severity of bugs.

> but it seems there is still a big gap between the resources for
> preparing SRUs and the resources for validating them.  Maybe we need
> to start pushing for self-verification of SRUs more aggressively?
> With defined test cases, this is less risky than in the past, and if
> SRU uploaders were explicitly expected to do the verification (if no
> one else does), then that could help reduce the problem of
> fire-and-forget SRUs clogging up -proposed with no one to verify
> them.

We have done this in the past for cases where verification for other
people proved hard/impossible, like for rare hardware. I don't think
that self-verification is a bad thing when being documented properly.
It's not even the primary concern for SRUs, as we most importantly
need to avoid regressions in them, not necessarily be completely sure
that all of the referenced bugs are 100% fixed (as we can always do a
followup SRU).

My feeling is that having fewer SRUs (for the non-LTSes) altogether
would go a long way in raising motivation again; what's your feeling
about this?

Thanks,

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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