Requesting an SRU exception approval for open-vm-tools

[Christian Ehrhardt]

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?

[1]: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2024-January/005882.html
-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Director of Engineering, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd