SRU policy for universe (was Re: Pending SRU Request; What to do?)

[Martin Pitt]

Hi,

Stefan Potyra [2007-11-19 13:47 +0100]:
> Well, the current SRU policy for universe was to have a very low entry barrier 
> for -proposed (aiming that archive admins should basically only check the 
> sanity of the version, due to a LP bug not being able to delete packages from 
> the -proposed queues)

Side note: we can do that now.

>  and to have testing being performed as the main 
> reviewing measure. This means that no peer review for actual updates would 
> happen, unless archive admins would perform additional checks prior to the 
> migration from -proposed to -updates.
> 
> The change was somewhat drastic from very picky reviews by motu-sru to no 
> reviews for universe SRUs at all. The goal of this change was to encourage 
> more SRUs being done (as the strict policy we had before seemed to have 
> scared MOTUs away) and to improve the throughput of SRUs.

There seem to be some fundamental philosophic differences here. You
say that MOTUs want more SRUs, no entry barrier to -proposed, and
-proposed being the play- and testing ground.

My philosophy is that at least in main we imposed enough bureaucracy
to *stop* people from doing non-essential SRUs, since:

 * We promise that it is a stable release and nothing changes unless
   we believe it is absolutely necessary *for existing installations*.
   This particularly means that we will not fix installation bugs,
   hardware support, etc, unless it is a major regression from a
   previous release.

 * We want people to actually use -propose to give us feedback. If we
   put random untested stuff into it, then nobody will do so because
   they will risk breaking their machines every other day.

   We don't let anything into proposed/main which has not been tested,
   peer reviewed, and acknowledged by ubuntu-sru.

 * Development efforts should go into the development release. There
   is no point in diverting a lot of effort into stables, since that
   effort will be missing in Hardy. This in turn will cause hardy
   universe to be worse than it could be and again bring up the need
   for hardy SRUs after release.

As it stands, this philosophy will not change for main and restricted.
It is of course possible to have your approach for
universe/multiverse, but then we need to communicate this clearly and
also change software-properties to provide separate checkboxes for
enabling -proposed for main and universe (since we cannot recommend in
good faith to turn on universe-proposed on production boxes).

Martin

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