Early backports to reduce post-release fixes

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:28:20 +0100 Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> 
wrote:
>Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz at ubuntu.com> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
>Short: I like the idea.
>
>I could imagine a lightweight approach: Activate the ~ubuntu-dev (or
>~motu) PPA, and use it as "backports-staging" archive. Proposed policy:
>
>- proposed package backports should be tracked via a malone bug
>- any motu may upload there if he feels that a package should be
>  backported, mentioning the LP bug number
>- the backport teams tracks these bugs and approves backports if
>  "enough" positive feedback from users has been given in the LP bug
>
The general standard has been one user reporting it builds, installs, runs. 
 For packages with rdepends, they need to be tested too.

This probably seems like a very low standard, but in virtually all cases it 
proves sufficient.

In some cases we ask for more testing if it seems prudent.

In short, I don't think we need the PPA step.

Scott K