First set of 16.04.5 RC images ready for testing

[Lukasz Zemczak]

Hey!

On 31 July 2018 at 06:33, flocculant <flocculant at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
> On 31/07/18 02:19, Lukasz Zemczak wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> The first set of official working builds for the upcoming xenial
>> 16.04.5 point release (due this Thursday, August 2nd) have been added
>> to the tracker [1] for all supported flavours. We had a few images for
>> this milestone already but had to re-spin due to quickly spotted
>> regressions. The ones now seem to be test-worthy at least.
>
> Would be useful to know what the regressions were ...

The first set of images were completely busted due to an out-of-sync
issue on cdimage (cdimage had an older debian-installer than what was
in the image itself and archive). The second batch had an issue when
using the debian-installer based installer with the default GA 4.4
kernel, causing a kernel panic. This was caused by the last minute
SCSI fix we got in (due to 4.4 behaving differently than 4.15 which
the fix was targeting). Basically it meant that no server install
using regular non-hwe kernels could be done.

>>
>>
>> Which is why please proceed with testing as soon as possible. Even
>> though we still have some days until the planned release, don't wait
>> until the last minute -  the earlier testing starts the more time we
>> might have for fixing any blockers found during testing.
>
> You mean the earlier that testing starts, the sooner we can rebuild, so your
> testing gets reset to zero again ;)
>
> It pretty much makes sense to wait before testing out in the real world
> where we test manually.

If people wait with the testing and then actually *do* find a
release-critical regression last minute, we'll basically won't be able
to re-spin and release in time. If we did as you say and did not start
performing sanity tests on the two earlier batches as soon as we did,
we wouldn't know things are completely busted. Now imagine this
happening a day before release. Fast-tracking a fix in through
-proposed to -updates and rebuilding all images takes at least a few
hours + the re-testing.
Yes, it's annoying that testing gets invalidated early and people have
to re-test the same thing a few times, but it's a cost worth paying to
not have to do an all-nighter before release in case something bad
happens. Bugs can pop up everywhere, some can effect only certain
flavours and can be potentially caused by even seemingly unrelated
changes.

This was also the reason why only after the third rebuild batch the
call-for-testing was sent out: the first two weren't ready.

>>
>>   As mentioned
>> by Adam during the 18.04.1 call-for-testing: images that have no
>> testing can't be released!
>>
>> Good luck!
>>
>> [1] http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/393/builds
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
> Cheers
>
>
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Cheers,

-- 
Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak
 Foundations Team
 lukasz.zemczak at canonical.com
 www.canonical.com