cloud-init SRU feature freeze exception review

[Chad Smith]

Hello release team,

    cloud-init currently has a standing SRU exception[1] which involves
fairly heavy integration testing and verification prior to upload and
release. We also have a nearly quarterly upstream release schedule that
puts us on a collision course with the beginning of feature freeze twice a
year. Given that cloud-init performs SRUs to all stable release which have
not reached End of Standard Support we frequently find ourselves uploading
into the incoming development release right around feature freeze time in
order to ensure the ability to SRU that content back into the other stable
release targets.

I am raising this thread to ask for review of a documented exception during
feature freeze (and only prior to beta freeze) where cloud-init has the
ability to perform uploads to a development series on the condition that
those uploads meet the required integration testing coverage and
verification that we perform typically for any SRU. Historically cloud-init
had performed one or two uploads during Feature Freeze in the past
following these same guidelines, but it was not documented in our SRU
exception.  Given that cloud-init follows a lot of the same guidelines and
approach to stability/consistency across series that ubuntu-advantage-tools
uses, it is probably worth us better documenting what we expect is
allowed/disallowed during feature freeze/beta-freeze as they
ubuntu-advantage-tools has[2].


For release team review: I'd like to add the following content to the
cloud-init SRU exception:

Exceptions [under review]

cloud-init performs upstream releases quarterly and SRUs to all active
stable releases which have yet to reach End of Standard Support. Because of
the quarterly release schedule, two of those planned release dates coincide
with early Feature Freeze periods.

Since these feature changes may land in stable releases at any time due to
our SRU exception policy, adhering to feature freeze during the development
cycle would be counterproductive as those changes would be forced to land
after release instead. Therefore, feature freeze will not apply when the
changes are in scope of this document. However, from beta freeze on uploads
of this package will be subject to the same additional scrutiny by the
Release Team as any other package.


I wasn't certain the best path to communicate/request this change in docs,
but figured we'd start with where some previous discussions about
exceptions have been discussed.


References:
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CloudinitUpdates
[2]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2023-November/005842.html

Many thanks,
Chad
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