Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Leann Ogasawara]

On 02/28/2013 12:49 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 05:09 PM, Martin Pitt wrote:
>>>   * Keep doing daily quality and keep improving our daily quality.
>>
>> Big +1. I'm particularly looking forward to integrating our automatic
>> package tests with britney.
>
> The QA work done in -proposed has increased the productivity for the
> rest of us, no doubt about that.
>
> But still, a word of caution here. Every piece of code even remotely
> related to the hardware, not only the Linux kernel but also most of
> the plumbing layer, is quite difficult (or even impossible) to
> automate testing for. Even if we would set up robots in our lab
> looking at the screen for artifacts, talking into the microphone and
> so on, we wouldn't cover the world's hardware.
>
> Hardware becomes increasingly complex, diverse, and so testing it
> takes a lot of time. You can't go test thousands of machines to see if
> their headphone outputs stopped working every single day.
>
> Do we have a plan to deal with those types of bugs?
>
>
> Somewhat related, I'm also wondering about the backport kernels we
> recently started working with. E g, in the development release we've
> been uploading 3.8-rc kernels rather than waiting until they're
> stable, this allows us to catch regressions and fix them early. Then
> we stay for a while and skip a kernel version or two - this helps us
> make a more stable backport kernel, and the six months cycle give some
> natural points for testing hardware too.
>
> What's the kernel's upload policy going to be for the rolling release?
> Do we upload kernels in the beginning of rc cycle, middle of rc cycle,
> at the stable release, or...?

Hi David,

I've also scheduled a UDS blueprint [1] for this very discussion.  At
the session I want to address all the questions you've raised above as
well as some additional items.  Please feel free to subscribe to that
blueprint and participate.  We'd very much value your input.

Thanks,
Leann

[1]
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/client-1303-rolling-kernel-maintenance

>
>>> = Why Now? =
>>> There are two answers for this.
>>>   1. Because of Convergence
>>>   2. Because we can
>>
>> You forgot the One True Reason for "Why Now?": I'm sure that it was
>> never meant to be a Raring Ringtail, but always a Rolling Release! We
>> couldn't do it at any other point in time.
>
> The real reason is of course that we're running out of letters; this
> way we're slowing down our letter consumption by a factor 4, this buys
> us like, 12 more years or so!
>
>