FinalFreeze - implications on Universe?

[Scott Kitterman]

Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>On 08/15/2011 11:56 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Kate Stewart <kate.stewart at canonical.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>
>>> Dear release team members, 
>>>
>>> Based on some discussions we've been having on the other Freezes,
>would
>>> like to see if there is consensus to make FinalFreeze[1], apply to
>>> Universe as well as main. 
>>>
>>>   Right now the process states:
>>>
>>> "For packages in universe that aren't seeded in any of the Ubuntu
>>> flavors, this final freeze is nominal; packages must be manually
>>> accepted by the archive admins, but no additional approval is
>>> required."
>>>
>>> There's no timing on this,  but historically we've not been
>accepting
>>> into the archive after a certain point. 
>>>
>>> What is "seeded" is also a bit ambiguous these days as well.
>>>
>>> So...
>>>
>>> 1) does it make sense to declare FinalFreeze to be freeze on all the
>>> archive?
>>>
>>> or 
>>>
>>> 2) do we want a separate explicit universe Freeze (and be clearer
>what
>>> is ok to upload in the period between FinalFinal freeze, and this
>date)
>>>
>>> or
>>>
>>> 3)...
>>>
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Thanks, Kate
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FinalFreeze
>> 
>> What problem are you trying to solve? We get a lot of good fixes in
>during this period, so it's not clear to me why we would want to change
>it.
>> 
>> Scott K
>> 
>For me, I would just be happy with a date....if it's adjusted each
>release and/or 2 days before release...again, I'm fine.  Speaking for
>myself, the problem is that without the date, an upstream can't
>communicate to their users what to expect to see in a given Ubuntu
>release versus what they'll need to use a daily-build/upstream snapshot
>for...because they don't know when the freeze occurs relative to their
>own development timeline.

The pre-release endgame is generally about mining existing fixes in Debian, upstreams, other distros, etc. If you need a date to give upstream developers, then I'd use the final freeze date we use for Main/seeded. I wouldn't want them to target that last few days.

Scott K