Backports procedures & Discussion

Matt Zimmerman mdz at ubuntu.com
Thu Jul 21 10:12:03 CDT 2005


On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 06:50:36PM +0100, Martin Meredith wrote:

> 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.

If it's sufficiently convenient for James to 

> [...]
> 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)

Right.  Naturally, backporters who are regularly making this kind of change
should apply for upload privileges by the usual means, in order to save
time and effort for all involved.

> 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

We should avoid creating too much bureaucracy within the team; it should be
governed the same way as other Ubuntu teams unless there is a specific
reason to do otherwise.  People should be able to "join" the team simply by
participating, without a formal process.

In the case of backports, there are specific privileges involved, but I
don't think it's necessarily required for all members of the team to hold
those privileges; in fact, it may be preferable to channel all requests
through a designated point of contact as you propose.

-- 
 - mdz



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