Review: Syncing from testing a success?

[Jamie Strandboge]

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 21:41 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:

>  (2) meant a smaller or larger amount of review and sync requests
> 
It seemed there were more sync requests to review, but hopefully the
archive admins won't have to keep doing this if the script/LP changes
come through.

>  (3) made it easier or harder to merge with Debian and get changes
>      integrated back upstream

Merges were a pain because at least on the stuff I did, I wanted a merge
from unstable more often than testing.

> (4) made library transitions easier or harder

Others have commented on this already, and I didn't personally notice
anything that went wrong that I attributed to library transitions, but I
also don't deal with these things too often. That said, I have a hard
time understanding how this could be made harder by syncing from
testing, since we should get everything all in one go, which *should*
approximate what a user would see on upgrades. Assuming this is the
case, merging from testing is better because it either works, or there
are problems and we see what users will see with a better opportunity to
fix the problems.

>  (5) anything else that caused or eased problems that you can think
>      of

For when I upload to Debian first to sync from unstable immediately to
maintain the same version in Ubuntu, I didn't mind doing a requestsync--
it just felt like when I would do this later in the cycle after we
stopped the auto-import.

In general, I still like the idea of merging from testing and
cherrypicking from unstable. It feels like overall we are getting better
quality packages. Sure there are times when something doesn't make it
into testing due to something Ubuntu doesn't care about, but I'm betting
the vast majority of times we do care about those bugs. I think this is
especially important for stuff that people aren't paying too much
attention to. For stuff where people are actively involved, it doesn't
matter, cause if they see a bug in something sync'd from unstable, they
are more likely to fix it.

All that said, it would be nice to adjust the tools for merging from
testing or unstable, and make it so that sync requests didn't require an
archive admin (which can be a bottleneck). If we stick with syncing from
testing, then perhaps we should push the auto-import date later in the
cycle, so we can continue to benefit from the bug fixes (at least for
non-LTS).

-- 
Jamie Strandboge             | http://www.canonical.com
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