Proposal for a JavaLibraryFreeze

[Matthias Klose]

On 04.11.2010 16:29, Robbie Williamson wrote:
> What if we had a ToolchainFreeze, that covered GCC, Java Libraries, and
> Python...

We already have this, by doing the toolchain upgrades at the beginning of a 
release cycle.  A formal freeze would mean to disallow bug fixes too.

> as changing any one of the 3 late in cycle can lead to extreme
> pain and suffering?

I'm not aware of any "extreme pain and suffering" during the last release 
cycles, besides where we did have planned updates.

  - The introduction of the Linaro GCC was planned at the maverick UDS,
    we did learn that it could have been better communicated.  There
    is code that is picky about compiler versions, especially the
    kernel. At the last sprint the kernel team did commit to build
    kernels with the next compiler version on a regular basis to avoid
    situations of surprise. Other packages like glibc use a versioned
    dependency on the compiler to handle this kind of transition.

  - The introduction of python2.6 as the default version didn't
    propagate well to the universe section of the archive. This
    is not specific to toolchain or python changes, but common
    to large scale changes.

I think our current policies for feature freezes is solid enough, and we can 
make exceptions to these on a case by case basis as proposed by the 
JavaLibraryFreeze proposal.

Matthias