request for freeze exception for Ubuntu Touch packages

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, August 06, 2013 16:02:52 Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Since it's a bit early yet for feature freeze exceptions, I thought it might
> be a good idea to explicitly draw the list's attention to an FFe I've just
> filed:
> 
>   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1208989
> 
> The set of features targeted for Ubuntu Touch in 13.10 is not going to be
> fully landed by feature freeze.  Rather than having the release team spend
> time on per-feature, per-package FFe requests for this, I'd like to request
> a blanket FFe for all the packages that are in the Ubuntu Touch images but
> not in other flavor images.  I think this is both consistent with our
> previous post-FF tracking of other upstreams with rigorous upstream QA
> processes (Ubuntu Touch has the most thorough QA process I've seen on any
> Open Source project of this magnitude), and makes sense given that Ubuntu
> Touch is a new project without existing users that need to be protected from
> regressions.
> 
> Note that I am proposing a blanket FFe that includes packages for which
> Canonical is not the upstream.  I think this is still reasonable, since:
> 
>  - those packages will still be covered by the integration testing done on
>    the Ubuntu Touch images
>  - those packages are not used on the images of other flavors
>  - almost none of those packages are actually going to be changed between
>    now and release (FFe or not).
> 
> Does this sound like an OK plan?

I would prefer to leave the Qt5 packages out of the standing FFe.  Although 
they aren't currently used by other flavors they will be in the future and now 
is the time to start being careful about accumulating distro specific changes 
(this has already been somewhat problematic).  

>From the list in the bug, this would be all of the qt*-opensource-src 
packages.  There may be a few others there too.  Fundamentally, new features 
should be added upstream on these packages, not in the distro (at least not 
without extensive coordination) so I don't think an FFe would be particularly 
helpful.

Scott K