Requesting an SRU exception approval for open-vm-tools

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

Hello! Sorry for the delayed response.

On Mon, Jan 8 2024 at 12:23:56 +0100, Christian Ehrhardt 
<christian.ehrhardt at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> after formerly (pre 2018) people often reporting issues of not having 
> an LTS that could work fully well with the latest VMware we have, now 
> for more than five years, done regular backports of open-vm-tools. 
> But a recent misunderstanding between Steve and myself has identified 
> that we missed to put this down clearly enough as a properly approved 
> "special case".
> 
> To be fair - In the past, AFAIK, we have not always done/needed such 
> exceptions for things that go to SRU under "other safe cases" [1], 
> but this case is not so much "safe" as more "a usually accepted kind 
> of risk for platform enablement". And since it caused 
> misunderstanding let us document this now, to avoid the same 
> misunderstanding to happen again in the future.
> 
> Hence I've created [2] as a wiki page documenting this case.
> I would now ask the SRU team for a review, discussion and hopefully 
> eventually sign-off to acknowledge this case and add its link to the 
> known special cases [3].

This broadly looks sensible, and open-vm-tools is a reasonable 
(virtual)-HWE case.

I've taken the liberty of reorganising the wiki page to stick a 
"Process" section up the top, and added some extra process verbiage. 
Please take a look and check that what I've moved around and added 
still makes sense and captures what you need.

There's an open question there, too - at what point after (or before?) 
a release do we first consider a backport of the open-vm-tools package?