Review: Syncing from testing a success?

[Daniel Chen]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> So, in your opinion, did syncing from testing
>
>  (1) help to avoid introducing larger breakage into Ubuntu (for the
>     domain you are usually watching)

It made no real difference for the audio stack (as Luke has mentioned
previously).

>  (2) meant a smaller or larger amount of review and sync requests

ditto

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

It was slightly more difficult (but not definitively so). pkg-alsa and
pkg-pulseaudio need serious assistance. I really didn't have time to
push changes back to Debian and instead pushed directly upstream of
Debian. When possible, I triaged in BTS.

>  (4) made library transitions easier or harder

no real effect

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

libsdl1.2 and openal-soft were divergent from unstable (and as such,
much more so from testing) fairly early in the 10.04 LTS cycle because
those versions contained very necessary fixes for pulse compatibility.
Only at a much later stage were they merged and synced, respectively,
from unstable. (In fact, the former source cannot be merged from
testing because of poor interaction with pulse.) Attempting to use
automatic syncs from testing would have made things more difficult. As
it stands, we did manual merges with sources from unstable, so it
isn't per se a hindrance.