Process to update major version of LMOD on LTS?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi Alexandre,

On 2023-06-07 17:35, Alexandre Strube wrote:
> Hi, I am the maintainer of LMOD on Debian.
> 
> For a long time we have been pushing for the update of LMOD on all
> systems. Turns out that most of the clusters and supercomputers using
> Ubuntu are on the LTS releases (20.04 and 22.04).
> 
> LMOD on them is a ancient version, prior to my time on Debian (6.x).
> 
> Many of the tools which rely on LMOD themselves deprecated support
> for LMOD a while ago, or are about to.
> 
> In order to overcome that, I have been providing packages for Ubuntu
> (and Debian Stable) on my Github repo [1], but I hope there’s a
> better way of doing so.
> 
> I had a meeting yesterday with LMOD’s author, and he guarantees that
> this is a drop-in replacement, and should be done officially.
> 
> Is there a way I can do so?
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/surak/Lmod/releases/
> 
> [] Alexandre Strube surak at ubuntu.com

The policy and procedures for stable release updates on Ubuntu are 
described here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

As you can see, a major version upgrade is normally not a candidate for 
SRU (which is similar to Debian).

A situation like this is what the backports pocket is for:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports

But if you think you have good enough arguments for making an exception 
for lmod, you can submit an SRU bug and describe your case using this 
template:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#SRU_Bug_Template

At this stage you should focus on the "Where problems could occur" 
section. Are there possible scenarios where lmod users of the older 
version might run into problems if the package gets updated?

Then subscribe the ubuntu-sru team, and maybe ping someone in the team 
too to talk about the possibilities.

-- 
Rgds,

Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj