SRU Documentation Reboot

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 11:20:48PM -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > You can find the new documentation here[3]:
> > https://canonical-sru-docs.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/
> 
> I read all of this and as a person with plenty of Ubuntu stale
> security update experience, reading the SRU process was easy and
> enlightening. Thanks for writing this!
> 
> There are a bunch of incomplete sections and todo type of items and
> comments in brackets ([]), but for a draft, everything looked good.
> One thing I'd like to see more is links to past exemplary SRU uploads.

That's a very good suggestion.  It would also be wise to refresh the
list routinely (maybe once an LTS cycle) since best practices tend to
evolve, and pointing to more recent exemplary SRUs will track that
better.

Along a similar line, one thing I've done for packages I SRU is browse
through the package's past Fix Released SRU bugs and note especially
well done ones to use as reference.  The [test plan] and [where
problems could occur] sections sometimes have package-specific steps
or insights that can be relevant generally for that package or at least
valuable sources of inspiration.

Bryce

> As a person doing packaging, it is always nice to be able to read the
> exact changelog entries and bug report contents and track the package
> statuses to learn how and when things happened in detail and to learn
> from curated examples.
> 
> As a side note, the page about Package-specific notes links to
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Documentation_for_Special_Cases,
> but I don't see anything about MySQL or MariaDB there. In reality we
> have been doing MySQL and MariaDB stable updates and security updates
> for years. I tried to search for the microrelease approvals from old
> mailing list archives, but I didn't find them - I am however pretty
> confident that they exist. MariaDB also a special mention in the
> security release process docs:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/PublicationNotes#Sponsoring_MariaDB_Security_Updates.
> 
> Nice to see documentation being worked on! For the "inner circle" the
> process is probably pretty clear, but to attract new contributors,
> having clear documentation is foundational.
> 
> I also have some suggestions on how to ensure there are no surprising
> changes in the uploads, but I will write a technical suggestion about
> that later. I also assume this doc is now being written to document
> current status, and perhaps not the forum for discussing process
> changes.
> 
> - Otto
> 
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