Moving Debian Import Freeze

[Colin Watson]

I disabled the auto-sync cron job last night, since the release schedule
says yesterday was Debian Import Freeze.  However, this seems weirdly
early to me, and I'm sure I remember UDS discussion about moving it
later.

Comparing with the last four release cycles, it's clear that this is an
outlier, and not in the direction I would expect given the significant
improvements in our ability to keep the development release usable:

  oneiric: week 9  (FF-6, A2-1)
  precise: week 13 (FF-3, A2-3)
  quantal: week 10 (FF-7, A3-3)
  raring:  week 17 (FF-3, A2)
  saucy:   week 8  (FF-10, A1-1)

Now, I know that Debian has unfrozen and all.  But I don't think we've
been seeing a particularly difficult amount of breakage actually making
it through to the release pocket, although we do have a reasonable
amount of stuff backed up in -proposed; in fact, I'd say that we've
taken the start of a fair few complex transitions already, and keeping
auto-sync going for a few more weeks would probably help some of those
through to completion (I'm thinking Apache 2.4 in particular) more than
anything else.  I propose splitting the difference between quantal and
raring, and moving saucy's DIF to week 13, the week of Alpha 2.

Bearing in mind that it's easier to do auto-syncs than to undo them,
I'll leave the cron job disabled until at least Tuesday morning.  If
nobody comments, I'll default to re-enabling it then.

#ubuntu-release log:

  22:55 <cjwatson> infinity: So I just commented out auto-sync for Debian import freeze, and was going to send mail about it, but I just noticed that raring's schedule had DIF in week 17 and saucy's schedule has it in week 8.  This seems a weirdly enormous discrepancy.  I thought I mentioned this in the UDS discussion - didn't we agree to move it?
  22:56 <infinity> cjwatson: Hrm, I didn't have moving it in my notes.
  22:56 <ScottK> IIRC it was supposed to be close to FF.
  22:56 <ScottK> (not from UDS, but generally from the raring discussion)
  22:57 <infinity> So, Raring had it at alpha2.  I'm not wildly picky about exactly when and where it lands, so long as it's not after FF. :P
  22:57 <infinity> And, honestly, we have people who like to play the role of the autosync bot after DIF anyway (a practice I'd love to stamp out)...
  22:58 <cjwatson> I know day-of is a crappy time to be asking about it, but it does seem incredibly weirdly early to me this time round.
  22:58 <cjwatson> Two weeks earlier than quantal, even.
  22:58 <infinity> cjwatson: I don't think anyone will mind if it slips later.  Maybe we can hit some mild concensus among people in the channel right now.
  22:58 <cjwatson> I agree it clearly ought to be before FF.
  22:59 <cjwatson> Raring had it coincident with Alpha 2.  That seemed OK to me.
  23:00 <infinity> cjwatson: I's be comfy with either A2freeze or FF.
  23:13 <ScottK> cjwatson: Sounds good to me.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]