Lucid auto-syncing with Debian testing

[Scott Kitterman]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2009 02:11:49 -0800 Steve Langasek 
<steve.langasek at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 11:35:43PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> I think doko's concerns about blockage due to transition issues  from 
>> Unstable to Testing are a reasonable consideration.  I think syncing 
from 
>> Debian Unstable is fine.  IMO, most of our recent toolchain related 
>> problems (Python 2.6 in Jaunty and GCC 4.4 in Karmic) were for being 
newer 
>> than Debian Unstable.
>
>Do you think the clarification that Ubuntu developers should consider
>themselves at liberty to request syncs from unstable for anything they 
think
>is appropriate addresses this issue?

It would, in part.  I am left somewhat uncertain about how to handle 
merges.  Manual merges are significantly more labor intensive than merges 
using MoM's output as a basis.  They are also, I suspect, significantly 
more error prone.  Perhaps we could run a second MoM instance so the 
packages more appropriately pulled from Unstable the need merging won't 
need a manual merge?

>> I wouldn't worry about Lucid +1.  LTS +1 releases are notoriously 
crackful. 
>>  A few extra merges won't affect that significantly.
>
>Agreed.
>
>> I'm personally quite dissappointed this decision was taken without 
>> significant community input.  IIRC, this is not what we discussed at the 
>> LTS/Debian planning session at the last UDS.
>
>This was certainly unintentional; my own recollection was that "sync from
>testing" was discussed at UDS and that it was not met with any major
>objections.  If I've misremembered and inadvertently kept the community out
>of the loop as a result, I apologize.
>
My recollection (which may well be wrong), is that post freeze/DIF syncing 
from Testing to pick up additional fixes, not syncing from testing the 
entire cycle, is what was discussed.

It sounds like we are past the Rubicon, so we ought to focus on 
documentation and updating needed tools.  In addition to MoM (as I mention 
above) and requestsync, that others have mentioned, I'm pretty sure there 
are others.  The u-u-d-t pull-debian-source script is one that comes to 
mind.

Scott K