Core packages i.e. Mesa in Ubuntu releases

[Matt Zimmerman]

(moving to ubuntu-devel as there's no need to keep this inside the tech
board)

Philip Wyett, CCed, raised a concern with regard to Mesa, which shipped with
a pre-release version in Ubuntu 8.04.

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 10:35:05AM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Thanks for raising this.
> 
> It certainly seems reasonable to move from an RCx to a release as an
> SRU.

In some circumstances, yes, but not generally (in my opinion).  In general,
our preferred approach is to go out with a stable release, and we should
only (knowingly) deviate from that when we have a plan for how to support it
in the field.

The case where this can happen unknowingly is if Debian updates to a
pre-release version of a package we don't touch.

> We did so with Firefox3.

In that case, we made an explicit choice to ship the pre-release, and to
update it to the final release, well before Ubuntu released.

> It's less clear that we should SRU subsequent releases, like 7.0.4 after
> 7.0.3.
> 
> Does the SRU process outline a preferred approach in these cases?

For point releases on a stable branch, yes.  For pre-release snapshots, no.

-- 
 - mdz