Minutes from the Technical Board meeting, 2011-11-03

[Colin Watson]

Technical Board meeting, 2011-11-03

= Attendees =

 * Colin Watson (chair)
 * Kees Cook
 * Martin Pitt
 * Matt Zimmerman
 * Soren Hansen
 * Stéphane Graber

= Notes =

 * Action review
  * Colin to setup a survey for a new Technical Board meeting time -- '''DONE''', should have responses soon
  * Stéphane to contact Stefano Rivera and if he agrees to be on the DMB, add him to the LP team and mailing list -- '''DONE'''
  * Stéphane to update the term of the DMB members to 2 years -- '''DONE'''
  * Stéphane to add the new members to the ARB -- '''DONE''' though still waiting for mailing list admin privileges

 * LTS cadence
  * https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2011-November/001121.html
  * By e-mail, Soren proposed codifying the long-term-support cycle length to two years, which has been the practical reality for some time anyway.  Mark supported this, with the proviso that we allow ourselves to make a one-time shift of six months either way in the event that Debian moved to a two-year cycle slightly out of phase with us.
  * We discussed various aspects of this in the meeting, but the board was aware that by this point people within the Ubuntu project were essentially operating on the assumption that the two-year cycle was fixed anyway, and the effect of making this official would mainly be to make us more predictable from other points of view.  By now, this is simply what our users expect from us.
  * The TB voted unanimously in favour of ratifying the e-mailed proposals.

 * Streamlining package set management
  * https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2011-October/001104.html
  * The Developer Membership Board (via Iain Lane) requested some minor changes to the package set management process to allow them to make small adjustments without the need for developers to present themselves at a DMB meeting, as long as those changes are advertised on devel-permissions@ with a waiting period.
  * The TB felt that a waiting period was not necessary for such changes, given e-mail announcements to devel-permissions at .  Aside from that, we approved Iain's proposal unanimously.

 * Proposal for criteria to become and remain a recognized derivative flavor, and proposal for criteria to designate flavor release as LTS
  * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecognizedDerivatives
  * Kate Stewart proposed some criteria for derivatives of Ubuntu to be recognised as flavours that we build as part of the coordinated Ubuntu release processes, and criteria for them to be designated as LTS releases.  (The former was largely codifying existing practice; the latter was new.)
  * We suggested some tweaks, but on the whole, this was close enough to what we understood as existing practice that we approved it unanimously.  The TB retains full discretion on designating a flavour as LTS (and some flavours are interested).

 * Opening backports pre-release
  * https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2011-November/001122.html
  * We had some initial discussion about this, but were unable to finish due to time pressure.  This will continue at the next meeting.

 * Next meeting is 2011-11-17.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]
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