Updates to Mesa in an LTS - How do you get one?

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Philip,

Philip Wyett [2009-04-15 19:20 +0100]:
> After pain of dealing with the RC Mesa in Ubuntu 8.04 ever since, I
> decided to email the technical board about why it and all releases
> should be based on a full release of Mesa + patches only, giving
> developers a clean base to work with. Mark Shuttleworth replied in a
> positive manner and indicated the prime example of why yes we should
> which was Firefox. This then got taken to this list and the public and
> after I filed the following general bug for an update of Mesa complete
> to a release.
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa/+bug/344710

The Technical Board is indeed the correct institution to override the
SRU team. I wasn't aware that this was discussed at TB before, do you
have a link to their official decision? If the TB positively decides
over this, then of course I'll accept the patch into -proposed.

I am aware about what we did with Firefox, but it's not really
comparable. A broken Firefox in an SRU is very bad, but at least it
can be rectified with another update. A broken X in an SRU is a
disaster, since it wouldn't even allow the user to get to
update-manager any more. Also, Firefox is not very hardware specific,
so it can be regression tested thoroughly by a few developers.
Anything touching hardware specific things such as mesa are virtually
impossible to regression test for us developers.

We did get burned by such updates in the past, this is why I am so
anal about them. 

> OK, that is the background. How do you successfully get an update? I think
> I have tried to do my part and contribute.

Contributions are welcome and appreciated, but they still have to follow the
SRU rules, I'm afraid. This is why we concentrate development and testing
efforts on the development releases, since the first thing we need to maintain
in stable releases is stability. Millions of users out there rely on that.

I regret and apologize that I didn't reject the hardy task right away
back then, to save everyone some work. I am doing that more timely
now.

Thank you for your understanding, and again sorry for the work you did on that
in vain,

Martin

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