Proposed use of maverick-updates for Linaro release staging

[Steve Langasek]

Hello fellow SRU team members,

As some of you are aware, with the Maverick cycle I've changed hats from
being release manager for Ubuntu to working on Linaro, an industry
non-profit centered on improving the state of the art of Linux on ARM.
Structured around its own six-month deliverables following the Ubuntu model,
Linaro will release a set of disk images for ARM systems in November 2010
based on the Ubuntu maverick release.

You'll notice that I didn't say October 2010.  For various reasons, the
Linaro release cycle is offset by a month from the Ubuntu release cycle and,
as a result, Linaro will still be in development at the time Maverick
releases on October 10.  Which brings me to the point of this mail. :-)

The Linaro team is intending to submit package updates to the SRU queue
between the Maverick release on October 10, and the Linaro release on
November 10.  Because Linaro will itself be in a deep development freeze at
this time, and all update requests will be done in compliance with the
Ubuntu SRU policy, I expect this will be fairly uncontroversial.  What may
be more controversial, however, is that in order to take advantage of
maverick-updates when preparing Linaro 10.11, we would need the SRU queue to
be frozen for a period of some time so that we have a stable archive to
build images against - similiar to the current policies in place around
Ubuntu LTS point releases.

I have already spoken with Colin and Martin about this, and they've given
their conditional assent; with this email I'm requesting input from the
other members of the SRU team, and laying out a detailed timeline for your
consideration and approval.

The timeline I propose is as follows:

  Mon, October 25:   UDS begins.

  Wed, October 27:   Freeze of the maverick-proposed queue.  No further
uploads are accepted without coordination with the Linaro release manager
(Jamie Bennett, cc:ed) until the -proposed queue is flushed.  This is also
the deadline for all Linaro release-critical SRU uploads; after this point,
any release critical fixes should be uploaded to the Linaro overlay PPA
instead and pushed to SRU as appropriate /after/ the 10.11 release, to
avoid any temptation of taking shortcuts with the SRU process.

  Mon, November  1:  Initial creation of Linaro release candidate images
with maverick-proposed enabled.  Begin work on finishing verification of
currently-outstanding maverick SRUs.

  Thu, November  4:  All maverick SRUs to be included in the Linaro images
are verification-done and promoted to maverick-updates.  If any packages
included in the candidate images of Nov 1 did not pass SRU verification,
images will be respun with only maverick-updates enabled.  Images should
also be respun if any image-affecting security updates have been issued this
week.

  Mon, November  8:  After confirming with the Linaro release team,
maverick-proposed is unfrozen.

  Wed, November 10:  Linaro 10.11 release.  Unfreeze promotions to
maverick-updates after taking a point release snapshot of maverick-updates
on cocoplum.

The total length of the maverick-proposed freeze would be 12 days.  In
theory we could unfreeze as soon as the Linaro images are respun on Nov 4,
but I think it's prudent to allow some padding here in case there are any
emergency SRUs that need to be pushed through in that window.  In any case,
the Linaro team would be happy to accomodate requests from the SRU team for
exceptions to this proposed freeze; we're mostly just asking for
coordination to prevent any disruptions to the image mastering.


Does this sound like a workable plan?  If it has your approval, I'd like to
announce it to the larger Ubuntu developer community, so that developers can
effectively plan around this SRU freeze window in their work if needed.

Thanks,
-- 
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                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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