Requesting an SRU exception approval for open-vm-tools

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Wed, Jan 24 2024 at 15:50:21 +0100, Christian Ehrhardt 
<christian.ehrhardt at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 7:45 AM Christopher James Halse Rogers
> <raof at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> 
>>  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.
> 
> Thanks,
> today I wondered about missing an answer, only to get help finding [1]
> and in turn finding this in my spam folder.
> So much for the reasons behind my extra week of delay to answer this.
> 
>>  I've taken the liberty of reorganising the wiki page to stick a
>>  "Process" section up the top, and added some extra process verbiage.
> 
> Thanks, any order that works better for you works for me as well.
> 
>>  Please take a look and check that what I've moved around and added
>>  still makes sense and captures what you need.
> 
> Yeah it is ok to focus on what matters and have most down there in
> "Past context" as you put it.
> 
>>  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?
> 
> Yeah, I see you also added that as "Question" in the wiki.
> Answering here and updating it there ...
> 
> In our experience we usually aimed for that to be 6 weeks (but often
> ended up with a bit more until we found the time).
> I think we can state 6 weeks in the exception, and if it takes more
> time to get prepared there is no harm to it.
> 
> Was there anything else you needed to consider this approvable?

That was my only question. I approve this MRE, and will update the SRU 
page accordingly.