[Oneiric-Topic] SRU Process

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, March 30, 2011 11:18:00 AM Douglas Stanley wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 30, 2011 10:40:36 AM Chuck Short wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> I do not have the statistics in front of me, but I believe most of
> >> users are using LTS releases of Ubuntu. The policy of cherrypicking
> >> fixes from the development releases does not scale in my opinon. We
> >> should offer PPAs for users who want to use a new version of for
> >> example Apache. Or go through the list of packages we support and see
> >> if we can get it to qualify as a micro release update.
> > 
> > We can also do a lot of this through backports.  We are very close to
> > having the backports only install packages that users explicitly request
> > from backports (just waiting on an LP change that's in progress), so it
> > will be much safer to use going forward.
> > 
> > Scott K
> 
> This is something I've wanted for a while. I know backports exist, but
> they're usually pretty limited. I'd really like to see more things
> backported. Like the previous poster stated, there's no reason to
> upgrade the entire OS if all we want is say a newer apache or nginx or
> puppetmaster, etc.
> 
> How are packages being selected for backports currently?

Here is the current documentation.  It's been awhile since I reviewed it, but 
I think it's ~up to date.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

It's driven by user request and testing.  In the case of packages with 
rdepends we require testing of those as well (sometimes rdepends need to be 
backported as well) so we don't leave users with a broken system.  A 
reasonably large fraction of users enable backports, so we need to be careful 
(you should have seenthe flurry of bug reports when I did a backport that 
broke Flash).

Once we have not-automatic fully deployed we might be able to reconsider this.

Backports are a purely community driven process, so we're always looking for 
more help.

Scott K