Thinking about SRU

[Ma Xiaojun]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes at canonical.com> wrote:
> Probably upgrade. Unless it's a supported package on a supported
> release; it's very unlikely that the fix will get back-ported to the
> older version. Some fixes are particularly problematic, because they
> require very large unrelated changes to be included as well, because
> upstream may have changed significantly from previous releases.

Upgrade sounds annoying since a system upgrade really means that all
things can be upgraded regardless of stability.

Assume that the hardware doesn't prefer a particular series, the new
comers would like latest series. But old users may want to stay in a
series longer. For example, I may want TeX Live 2012 in 12.10 but not
GIMP 2.8 and LibO 3.6. Even if TeX Live 2012 is a too big change for
12.04 (it ships TeX Live 2009), upgrade to TeX Live 2010 may make
things a little better and the risk is still manageable.

For back port, I guess the upstream is generally not interested and
Ubuntu developers generally care more about next-cycle. That's fine.
However, I believe bugs should be honestly kept open for origin
reported series; at least be there and waiting for community
contribution.

> And the SRU team will reject anything that they can't reliably test for.
> It's your job to provide the information that is documented as required
> on the wiki, not the SRU team's job to keep asking people to provide
> that info.

I don't think there is "keep asking". You ask and leave until a
follow-up E-mail notification come.

> Multiverse is unsupported, and binary-only packages are extremely hard
> to assess potential regressions for. Even packages in Universe are not
> a good example, as most of them are not supported. However, getting SRUs
> for things is really not all that difficult.

I don't remember when Ubuntu make Universe and Multiverse enabled by
default. My memory of 5.10 era may be totally wrong, though. Why my
system allow me to mess up with unsupported stuff by default?

For "rar", do you think something that would be pulled by file-roller
need some special treatment, probably "restricted inclusion request"?
Ultimately, why should a supported main package (file-roller) pull and
invoke a unsupported multiverse package.

I'm trying to make fun on your policy. However, I feel that the
boundary is not clear at least for uninformed people.

For binary review, yes it's hard, please ask what you want to see at least.