Generalizing SRU policy for special cases/MREs

[Marc Deslauriers]

On 2015-09-01 10:42 AM, Martin Pitt wrote:
> 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
> 

I think this proposal makes sense, as long as the SRU team is comfortable with
it. A +1 from me.

Marc.