Ubuntu Touch release mechanics

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 02:08:50AM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > 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.

> > The reason it wasn't announced is that it was understood both that Ubuntu
> > developers outside of Canonical aren't answerable to Canonical management,
> > and that the risk originates entirely within the Canonical team due to
> > ongoing feature development targeting 13.10 for Ubuntu Touch.  Although
> > Colin didn't say so explicitly, I think the logical extension of this is
> > that community members are *not* required to coordinate their changes with
> > the folks managing the Ubuntu Touch landing, regardless of which mechanism
> > is used for coordination within Canonical.

> > So in the context of the spreadsheet, it was entirely appropriate to ask for
> > the folks within Canonical who were working on the Qt 5.1 landing to
> > coordinate that with respect to other changes landing on the phone images;
> > but that doesn't imply either that the team has been given carte blanche to
> > make *other* changes to qtwebkit, or that community changes are expected to
> > pass a gauntlet with the Touch team before they can be accepted into the
> > archive.

> I have seen grumpiness (it was awhile ago, I don't recall specifics) when other 
> packages that are normally run through the CI infrastructure get uploaded 
> straight to the archive, so I am (perhaps overly) concerned about a trend 
> towards there being mechanisms in place that it's difficult for the broader 
> community to participate in.

Any such grumpiness is contrary to the explicit policy that Ubuntu
developers should still be able to directly upload any package that's part
of the daily landing system, in order to fix bugs.  It's of course not
reasonable to require that Ubuntu devs submit their bugfixes for Ubuntu to
some other process that they don't have access to drive.

What might result in a certain amount of grumpiness is if a package that
normally goes through the daily-landing CI framework is uploaded directly to
the archive bypassing that CI, and introduces regressions due to less
rigorous QA.  We ought to address that by making it more practical for
developers to kick off local runs of the CI tests, and/or by making sure all
the daily-landing testing is also run as autopkgtests.  (AIUI the latter is
in progress.)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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