[Oneiric-Topic] SRU Process

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, March 31, 2011 01:45:21 PM Chuck Short wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:25:44 -0400
> 
> Etienne Goyer <etienne.goyer at canonical.com> wrote:
> > On 11-03-30 11:05 AM, Scott Kitterman 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.
> > 
> > The mechanism itself is really only half the question.  I am more
> > interested in the level of commitment we are willing to make in
> > keeping certain key software "fresh" in LTS.  Whether we deliver
> > these in backports, PPA or some other mechanism is really just an
> > implementation detail, IMHO.
> 
> Right when I brought this up, I was more interested in the burden of
> tracking down the fixes in upstream code, backporing the fix, and
> asking for user testing. If you look at:
> 
> http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html
> 
> We have a lot of requests for SRU bug fixes which takes time to
> fix. Depending on the workload that what have, we do what we can.
> 
> From the systems administrator perspective if they want to use newer
> versions of apache, mysql, etc then great they can use backports/ppa.
> If they want to be a more cautious then they can still use the
> *-updates pocket. Its really all about choice in this case.

The one thing I'm not allowed to do in Backports is use it as a substitute for 
the SRU process (I know no one has suggested that, just trying to be clear).

Scott K