SRUs and the development release

[Scott Kitterman]

Iain Lane <laney at ubuntu.com wrote:

>Greetings,
>
>I noticed a few SRUs have been approved lately which have failed to
>build in Quantal due to toolchain differences. Examples:
>
>https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntuone-client-gnome/3.0.1-0ubuntu1.1
>
>  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/5.12-0ubuntu2
>
>I know that the process has been tightened up recently, and that will
>hopefully help prevent some of this taking place, but just looking for
>Fix Released bug tasks in the development release is not enough
>(because
>this happens when the source upload is processed, not when binaries are
>successfully built).
>
>It's not clear to me what we can do about people not test-building
>their
>uploads, but could the SRU team make it clear that just uploading to
>the
>development release is not enough — the fixes have to *work* there too?
>It's a small amount of extra work to additionally check the build
>status, but hopefully it'll pay off in a more solid dev release, which
>is a meme we've been trying to establish, after all.

This is a problem for all uploads and not just SRUs (lack of proper test builds and such). I'm not sure it really makes sense to put this extra level of work on the SRU team.  I'd rather have interested developers keep an eye on development uploads overall and wield a cluebat as needed.

On the flip side, does it make sense to deny our users important bug fixes be because the development release defaults to a different compiler.

Scott K