proposed-migration, "SMOOTH_UPDATES", and NBS reports

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 08:58:03AM +1300, Michael Hudson-Doyle wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Dec 2021 at 05:42, Julian Andres Klode <julian.klode at canonical.com>
> wrote:

> > On Wed, Dec 08, 2021 at 05:29:19PM +0100, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> > > Hey again,

> > > Le 08/12/2021 à 00:14, Steve Langasek a écrit :
> > > > I expect that with this option set, we will find much fewer problems
> > > > with entanglement of library transitions, and in turn I hope
> > > > developers will be less frustrated by migration delays.
> > > Right, I expect that to be the case.  It's going to come at the cost
> > > of reducing the pressure for the team to complete the transitions
> > > since that's not going to get in the way of having their updates to
> > > land.  My personal feeling is that it's going to turn out to be an
> > > issue for the archive and the release teams and that we aren't going
> > > to find proper staffing to deal with the problems, but hopefully I'm
> > > wrong there, we will see.

> > I think we should

> > - disable smoothing at feature freeze

> So we're now a little past feature freeze and smooth_updates is still in
> effect. This made the recent python/perl/the world transition a bit easier
> so that was probably a good thing overall but now that's behind us, maybe
> we should disable it now?

FWIW I didn't respond to this at the time because I expect this to have low
impact in practice.  It would be exceptional for a transition to start after
feature freeze, and transitions that were already in progress prior to the
freeze but not completed are usually ones that we want to finish before the
release - for which smooth updates are still a benefit.

Weighed against the cost of another place that we have to make a config
change every time we reach feature freeze, I would prefer to leave the
current policy intact.

Also, since this thread began, we've also limited the smooth updates to only
apply to packages in the libs and oldlibs sections, which should further
limit any collateral damage.

Do you all think this is ok as a path forward?

> > - work on getting NBS to 0 by beta freeze

> So this becomes less of a whackamole.


> > If it doesn't work, maybe we need to revert to not autosmoothing
> > and force or add a smooth hint.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20220304/95dc525f/attachment.sig>