Re-evaluating Ubuntu's Milestones

[Dustin Krysak]

I follow suit with Steve here with regards to the automated testing (the
referenced gate). If there are toolsets that already exist - even better!
And from the sounds of it, the process has already been vetted.

Dustin

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018, 16:13 Steve Langasek, <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 09, 2018 at 02:31:31PM -0500, Simon Quigley wrote:
> > On 2018-04-09 03:30, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> > > well, apart from actual installer fixes, your users should get all
> > > these fixes through package updates anyway ...
>
> > Right, which is another point for getting rid of these extra milestones,
> in
> > my opinion.
>
> > > One thing that the other pro/con responses did not cover yet but that
> > > should not be underestimated is the promotional aspect of milestones
> > > ...
>
> > > You typically get press coverage for such pre-releases and will likely
> > > attract more testers.
>
> > Not really, actually. In my experience, testers are present when there
> is an
> > occasion to test them, regardless of putting a name to it or releasing an
> > ISO. I could see your point if my proposal was to get rid of the
> milestones
> > entirely with no replacements, but in this case, having the testing week
> > once a month would attract press coverage as well.
>
> > Why? Because milestones in all reality are just a fancy name to slap on
> an
> > ISO that will most likely be stale the next day. You then get people
> > installing from these ISOs and potentially even reporting old bugs. The
> > unfortunate reality of this press coverage is that you could pick an ISO
> any
> > day of the month and call it "beta," and just because it has that name
> on it
> > means that people will install it because of the appeal of the name.
> Despite
> > the positive press that comes from the associated announcements (that can
> > always be made regardless, which is what Lubuntu has started doing[1]),
> in a
> > technical sense, I would even consider it *bad* for people to install
> using
> > these ISOs.
>
> > The coordinated testing weeks would allow for there still to be positive
> > press coverage (and maybe announcements resulting from cross-team
> > collaboration during these times) while not having the downsides of a
> > blessed image when the archive isn't in a decently stable state.
>
> I agree (as you know).
>
> The one other value milestone images provide is to give a "known good"
> image
> to install the development release from.  We have solved this for Ubuntu
> Desktop and Server by having automated tests that gate the promotion of an
> image build to "current".  I would strongly encourage flavors to
> collaborate
> around this automation, instead of continuing to rely on a heavy-weight
> manual test process that leaves the "known good" image stale for weeks at a
> time.
>
> Code for this automation lives here:
>
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-test-case-dev/ubuntu-test-cases/desktop
>
> If there is interest from flavors in having this image gate, I would be
> willing to argue for Canonical hosting of the test infrastructure, as
> necessary.
>
> And if there *isn't* interest from flavors in doing this, well, I also
> don't
> think that should block on that as a reason to carry on with the existing
> milestone process, which I think is a very inefficient use of everyone's
> time.
>
> So to summarize, I think the right path forward is:
>
>  - discontinue all opt-in milestones for 18.10 and beyond
>    - implicitly discontinuing the matching milestone freezes
>  - coordinate a cadence of "testing weeks", organized by the flavor leads
>    (i.e.: requires no involvement from ubuntu-cdimage or ubuntu-release in
>    order to drive to success)
>  - at the flavor teams' discretion, implement automated QA gating of daily
>    image promotions
>
> --
> 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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-- 
Dustin Krysak
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