Generalizing SRU policy for special cases/MREs

[Marc Deslauriers]

On 2015-09-02 05:28 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 04:42:26 PM 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_excus
>> es.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 is generally a good change.  The one suggestion I have is to 
> adjust the "New upstream microreleases" section slightly.  Starting with the 
> last line added in that hunk of the patch:
> 
> ... it is also generally acceptable to upload new microreleases (~ubuntu-sru 
> will make the final determination). The upstream QA process must be 
> documented/demonstrated and linked from the SRU tracking bug.  In other cases 
> where such upstream automatic testing is not available, exceptions must still 
> be approved by at least one member of the Ubuntu Technical Board.
> 
> The reason I leave this in is that the proposed language doesn't cover all the 
> current micro-release exceptions.  Postfix is an example where we have tests, 
> but they don't fit the listed criteria, but I am completely comfortable with 
> the mix of upstream fix policy in point releases and our own tests being 
> adequate QA to make the MRE that's in place appropriate.
> 

I think this is a reasonable request.

Marc.