Generalizing SRU policy for special cases/MREs

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

over the years our SRU policy [1] has accumulated a fair amount of
special cases [2] and exceptions for new microreleases [3]. There is a
lot of commonality between them, mostly related to automated testing.
Since most of these were added, a lot of projects have moved to a CI
based development model; this includes Ubuntu itself, which is now
running package integration tests for both the development series [4]
and SRUs [5].

The attached patch against [1] is my proposal for updating the SRU
policy accordingly. It mostly extends the "When" section for the cases
that we've seen in practice, and reduces [2] to just documentation
about three packages (kernel, landscape, tzdata), which don't include
a changed policy, just a "how to update this".

This should go together with dropping [3]. A lot of the existing
entries in [3] now fall under the revised "New upstream microreleases"
policy (e. g. postfix, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, firefox, mesa), and others
have been obsolete for quite a while (Ubuntu One, bzr). The section at
the bottom ("SRU verification for Micro Release Exceptions") was
included into the main [1] documentation (in spirit, not verbatim). I
believe that the page [3] has never been very well maintained, as
things become obsolete, there is no clear distinction between
provisional and full exceptions, etc. Thus I believe setting a general
policy and instead asking for linking to the QA policy in SRU bugs is
a better and more dynamic approach.

Comments, language improvements, etc much appreciated!

Thanks,

Martin

P.S. I still have a TODO item to propose an amendment for introducing
new features into LTS, such as the recently proposed "Ubuntu FAN" [6].
I will do this after this cleanup got discussed/improved/accepted.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Special_Cases
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions
[4] http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/proposed-migration/update_excuses.html
[5] http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/pending-sru.html
[6] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2015-July/002122.html

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