Proposed use of maverick-updates for Linaro release staging

[John Dong]

Hi Steve,

I think this sounds reasonable. The window between Maverick's release and Maverick's SRU freeze gives a good window of time to push out those last-minute bugfix updates that always tend to crop up right around release time.

That would be the only concern that I'd have to a freeze of maverick-proposed, but as far as I can see, that won't be an issue.

You have my approval on this :)


John

On Sep 24, 2010, at 3:07 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:

> 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