Karmic kernel common debian infrastructure acceptance request

[Steve Conklin]

On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 08:51 -0600, Tim Gardner wrote:
> Hello Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team,
> 
> Stefan has informed me that the proposed Karmic upload has not been 
> accepted on the grounds that the debian packaging changes are too large 
> and do not address a specific bug, thereby violating SRU policy.
> 
> As you are no doubt aware there has been an enormous proliferation of 
> kernel packages beginning with the netbook branch in Hardy, then rapidly 
> multiplying as we added incompatible source code bases for the various 
> ARM branches in Jaunty, Karmic, etc. This trend is likely to continue 
> until the ARM community can coalesce around a single source code base.
> 
> In an effort to reduce the maintenance cost of the various branches I 
> started an effort to adopt a common debian packaging infrastructure 
> across all releases. Andy has continued that effort and applied it to 
> all branches in the Lucid and Maverick releases.
> 
> Here is a short synopsis provided by Stefan (which you may have already 
> seen on another list):
> 
> * Abstracted debian was introduced in the Karmic to allow handling
>      the topic (arm, ec2) manageable when needing to include security
>      and proposed changes from the master.
> * This was SRUed back into Jaunty (and Intrepid) based on our
>      verification with debdiff which makes sure that the resulting
>      binary packages are the same before and after.
> * The downside of the current implementation in Karmic is that
>      some files which are used commonly had been split up. So fixing
>      a bug in the build system requires the same fix to be done manually
>      to all topic branches.
> * In Lucid this was changed to make it possible to have common files
>      shared so changes would just automatically fall through to all topic
>      branches. This mainly consists of moving files around. Though the
>      diff seems big.
> * Again this has been verified by comparing the binary files before and
>      after. The few differences found were actually considered to be bugs
>      before and the right results showed up in the new packages (but all
>      changes also were not affecting the operation of the kernel, like
>      documentation files getting packaged now).
> * So the changes are not affecting the binary code and are thought of
>      being very useful to have a maintainable build system across all
>      topic branches and lessen the risk of errors due to different build
>      system in different releases.
> 
> In summary I would ask that these proposed Karmic changes be accepted. I 
> intend to push for the same changes in Hardy. If necessary we could 
> provide a Karmic source package with only the debian infrastructure 
> changes, thereby making it easy to compare the outputs from the previous 
> version.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> rtg
> -- 
> Tim Gardner tim.gardner at canonical.com
> 
ACK (fwiw)


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