Early backports to reduce post-release fixes

[Luca Falavigna]

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When I was a motu-sru member, I realized the great majority of SRU
candidates to be processed were related to visible bugs (crashes when
doing normal tasks, uninstallable packages, and so on). This kind of
issues could have been addressed in time for the release if widespread
testing was conducted on the affected packages.

We cannot enforce people to upgrade to current development release just
to have more testers, many people believe development release is
completely unusable until release day. I was moderator of Italian
forums, I have several examples of these "isterisms", where people was
scared to see "development branch" in MOTD!

How can we help motu-sru to avoid some SRU requests for trivial tasks,
allowing a greater audience to test packages without the need to
upgrade? My proposal is to prepare early backports of the most commonly
used packages in Universe. Starting from Feature Freeze, we could
identify some packages with high popcon and determine if it's worth to
prepare a backport for current stable release (new upstream releases,
new features to be tested, and so on), so the main part of the Ubuntu
users can effectively test packages and report issues, so they can be
fixed in time for the release.

What do you think?

- --
 . ''`.      Luca Falavigna
 : :'  :  Ubuntu MOTU Developer
 `. `'`     Debian Maintainer
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