Request for guidance from motu-release

[James Westby]

Hi motu-release,

First of all, thanks for the difficult job that you are about to
undertake.

I would appreciate a statement from the team about the freeze
now that it is in effect. We have general freeze exception
guidelines

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreezeExceptionProcess

but I would be interested in what your approach would be for this
cycle. What extra policies will you be applying? What do you
expect of contributors? Is there anything that you think should
people should focus on?

I think we have a lot of new contributors since the last freeze,
so some people won't have experience to fall back on, and an
email explaining things has a different feel to a standing wiki
page.

Also, during a discussion about the rush to upload things, even when
there are known problems, before the hardy feature freeze, and ways to
avoid it, Stefan said:

> I guess one measure is a gradual freeze policy, which starts out with a very 
> soft layer of thin ice at the beginning, and gets to an unbreakable barrier 
> at the end of the freeze. (I tried to apply this measure for this cycle, with 
> almost waiving through new packages at the beginning). Of course such a 
> policy must also be made well known (which didn't happen this cycle yet, 
> sorry for this). [1]

Will a similar policy be followed this cycle? It's too late to
make this policy well known pre-freeze, but it would still help
people to decide what should be proposed for a freeze exception,
helping them to work more effectively.

Thanks,

James

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-April/001002.html