Ubuntu Touch release mechanics

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:34:33PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> I happened to have recently run across a discussion about this spreadsheet, so 
> I am, merely by coincidence, aware of it.  While almost all of the packages on 
> their list are on the phone image, some of them are not limited to the phone, 
> in particular qtwebkit 5.1.1 that was just landed without a lot of discussion 
> outside their team.  I don't think such general packages should be on a list 
> of packages that Touch "controls".  qtwebkit-opensource-src is in both the 
> Ubuntu Desktop and Kubuntu packagesets.
> 
> This completely unannounced list of packages they don't want people to touch, 
> doesn't help much if it's not announced.  This needs to go to U-D-A, but it 
> does need (as you did put it) to be in form a request.  We don't have 
> maintainer locks on packages in Ubuntu and that's an organizational feature we 
> should maintain.

I think this is more of an extended "block while preparing milestone
images" than a maintainer lock, FWIW (and for example I'm hoping that we
won't need quite such strict controls when not in the run-up to a
release and will be advocating for that when the time comes; I doubt
that this level of manual checking will be sustainable even on a
personal level for very long).  I don't have much knowledge of the
qtwebkit case specifically, though obviously I feel that it smooths
things for everyone if people actually talk to each other in cases of
overlap.

> > 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.
> 
> Several of the people in the team are not ubuntu-dev.  I don't think we should 
> be handing out britney access to non-developers.  I think the subset of the 
> team that are Ubuntu Developers would be fine (and there's at least one non-dev 
> on the team that could, I'm sure, trivially get it back if he asked the DMB).

I've reduced ~ubuntu-touch-release to a subset of ~ubuntu-dev, and
pointed the ex-core-dev in question to the DMB.

> I think as long as access is limited to Ubuntu Developers and they only manage 
> packages that are unique to their images/package sets it's a reasonable thing 
> to do (a quick scan of the packages on the spreadsheet suggests to me that 
> qtwebkit-opensource-src is the only package that affects (and it's been 
> landed).
> 
> For the future, I'd suggest these teams be limited to core-dev or MOTU/flavor 
> dev with some demonstrated understanding of archive wide management issues.  
> All the Ubuntu Dev on the currently proposed team are core-dev, so that 
> distinction isn't relevant to the current experiment.

Thanks for the feedback.  I'm inclined to agree in general.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]