Backports procedures & Discussion

[Martin Meredith]

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The following is an email discussion regarding the backports processes,
I'd like general comments etc regarding what I have to say

- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Backports procedures
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:18:54 +0100
From: Martin Meredith
To: Matt Zimmerman
CC: James Troup, John Dong,  Mark Shuttleworth, "Benj. Mako Hill",
Oliver Grawert, Sebastian Droege
References: <20050712221918.GW29376 at alcor.net>

Hi Everyone.

Ok, after talking about this in CC, as suggested, it seems that
apparently it's nothing to do with CC

The initial backports team should be as outlined at
https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/people/ubuntu-backporters/+members/ (with
the addition of John Dong as soon as I can find his launchpad profile)

These people should be allowed to request that backports be started
(through James, until some other infrastructure is put into place) or,
someone should be appointed as a SPOC for the backports team who would
be in contact with elmo (and MOTU) to initiate this.

I also propose that there should be a SPOC for the backports team, and
that person should be agreed upon by the Tech Board (as I know some
people have issues with not being able to contact John)

I think we're pretty much agreed on the process of how backports will be
done, that they will be automatically backported from breezt (or current
distro +1) and if they do not build from scratch, the changes to make
them do so will have to be made and put into breezy, so that the
backport will build from breezy. Obviously, this will mean that the
changes will have to be made through maintainers, so sponsored uploads
for the changes will be need from MOTU (until a member of the backports
team becomes MOTU or similar and has upload access themselves)

Also, as some things will need to be backported from main, any changes
that need to be made will need to be sponsored by a main uploader, so we
will need to establish a contact for the backports team to talk to
regarding that (or multiple contacts depending on the item being
backported - for example, Johnathon Riddell for KDE stuff)

Once the team is built, they should "self-govern" the team, with certain
people having a key vote on accepting members (I would suggest myself,
John and ogra and possibly one other person as those people) similar to
the process of accepting new members/maintainers, but keeping it
seperate from the Tech Board and CC, obviously however, if there were
ever direct upload allowed, or some other system than poking elmo,
permission to access that system would be allowed by beomcing a maintainer

Anyway, I think I've rambled enough, and I think that the
suggestions/propositions above should either be decided between the
people recieving this email, or via Techboard.

Please reply (Reply-All) with any comments.

Regards,
Martin Meredith

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> It looks like the dpkg test was successful, so backports appears to be
> operational.  What is your preferred approach for backports requests?
> Should they simply be mailed to you?  These requests should include a source
> package name, and a version number.  These should correspond to the current
> package in breezy.
>
> Users should be able to add the following line(s) to sources.list in order to
> use the backports repository:
>
> deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-backports main restricted
> deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-backports universe multiverse
>
> The formation of an official backports team should be discussed at the next
> CC meeting, but in the interest of getting the project going (and testing
> the infrastructure further), but in the meantime, please honor requests
> which come from john.dong at gmail.com or martin at sourcefrog.net.
>

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