Ubuntu Touch release mechanics

[Colin Watson]

Hi folks,

I've been working with the Ubuntu Touch folks to try to improve how
they're landing changes.  At the moment, to try to keep control of
things in the run-up to 13.10, they're tracking all their landings in a
spreadsheet and asking people not to upload things out-of-band from that
that affect Touch images.  A few of us saw some improvements to be made
here and suggested using proposed-migration blocks instead of gatewaying
uploads, in the hope that that will involve less many-to-many
communication and make it easier to test and approve changes.

So, I've set up an ~ubuntu-touch-release team with a list of members
given by Alexander Sack, and I plan to give them a hints bzr branch
shortly with the delegated ability to use the "block" and "unblock"
hints.  At the moment we have no way to access-control this to just
certain images, but TBH I trust that those people are way too busy at
the moment to want to spend time interfering with anyone else. :-)  If
it becomes a problem then I can certainly look into that.

I realise I didn't discuss this very far in advance (though I haven't
actually set up the delegation yet), which is because it's been
happening too quickly - sorry about that.  But I think this level of
control is a reasonable one to delegate to people release-managing an
image and shouldn't cause a problem if we talk to each other.  For most
of the time between now and 13.10 a lot of the archive is going to be
blocked anyway, and I expect we'll want to look at how this worked after
13.10.

For the avoidance of doubt, if people think this experiment is a
reasonable one, I think it would make sense to extend it to more of the
image release management teams in perhaps a slightly less ad-hoc way;
perhaps each image release management team should be able to
block/unblock uploads within their package set, for instance, so that it
doesn't all have to be within the primary release team who have full
control and can break anything.  What would people think of that kind of
thing?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]