Revisions to the Backports process

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Hi!

So, whilst I filed RT#37048 for the wiki.u.c/UbuntuBackports page that
is misbehaving, I copied the page under /WIP and I'm doing some
changes.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports/WIP

I'm dropping here some notes concerning those changes, so that you may
(or may not) comment on them.

* moved "Responsibilities of the Backporter" to the top
  Really that's probably the biggest change compared to before, and
  (also in debian) I know it's going to be selectively ignored by
  contributors.  So I'd like to highlight it.
* In the testing point, I dropped this:
     This testing should cover as much of the package functionality as
     possible, not just any missing functionality or feature that you
     are requesting the backport for.
  The reason being that doing that it's a *huge* burden.  It totally
  doesn't feel so while writing, and it could even be considered the
  proper thing to do.  But I'm sure not even us 3 would ever bother
  doing that.  Imagine having to test every single devscripts and
  ubuntu-dev-tools script for all releases I'm going to backport the
  package in.  Or having to test as many entry points of a library
  package.  That's just not going to happen, so let's not lie on the
  process page either.
* in "Continued Functionality of Reverse-Dependencies": it's not
  feasible to say that a backported package must always work with any
  possible rev-dep.  There are plenty of cases when that's not even
  wanted.  That's fine IMHO.  I changed the requirement to a "should"
  (from a "must") and added a sentence saying that if that's not
  possible the package needs to carry a Breaks, etc.
* I tried to replace "the person requesting the backport" to "the
  backporter", as that's more correct with the new procedure, since
  that person is not "requesting" only anymore, they are actually doing
  the work.
* Also clarified that the backporter is responsable for bugs that are
  specific of the backported version of the package.
* I added quite a bunch of words about the package versioning
* "and/or if you are unfamiliar with preparing packages for upload" -
  I'm not dropping that, but honestly, if we have such people in our
  ACLs I'd feel much more comfortable if we had their rights revoked…
* you wrote "This policy specifically means that backports are allowed
  for interim (non-LTS) releases, but are not required.", but I thought
  we agreed that we do not *want* backports in non-LTS expect for
  special cases.   I rewrote it accordingly.
* I added that "special cases" section I already sent to this ML earlier
  in the month.


Honestly, if you get me the green light I'd like to start by doing those
"tools uploads" next week (for you to review then :P)

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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