Generalizing SRU policy for special cases/MREs

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 04:42:26 PM Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> over the years our SRU policy [1] has accumulated a fair amount of
> special cases [2] and exceptions for new microreleases [3]. There is a
> lot of commonality between them, mostly related to automated testing.
> Since most of these were added, a lot of projects have moved to a CI
> based development model; this includes Ubuntu itself, which is now
> running package integration tests for both the development series [4]
> and SRUs [5].
> 
> The attached patch against [1] is my proposal for updating the SRU
> policy accordingly. It mostly extends the "When" section for the cases
> that we've seen in practice, and reduces [2] to just documentation
> about three packages (kernel, landscape, tzdata), which don't include
> a changed policy, just a "how to update this".
> 
> This should go together with dropping [3]. A lot of the existing
> entries in [3] now fall under the revised "New upstream microreleases"
> policy (e. g. postfix, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, firefox, mesa), and others
> have been obsolete for quite a while (Ubuntu One, bzr). The section at
> the bottom ("SRU verification for Micro Release Exceptions") was
> included into the main [1] documentation (in spirit, not verbatim). I
> believe that the page [3] has never been very well maintained, as
> things become obsolete, there is no clear distinction between
> provisional and full exceptions, etc. Thus I believe setting a general
> policy and instead asking for linking to the QA policy in SRU bugs is
> a better and more dynamic approach.
> 
> Comments, language improvements, etc much appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Martin
> 
> P.S. I still have a TODO item to propose an amendment for introducing
> new features into LTS, such as the recently proposed "Ubuntu FAN" [6].
> I will do this after this cleanup got discussed/improved/accepted.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Special_Cases
> [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions
> [4]
> http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/proposed-migration/update_excus
> es.html [5] http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/pending-sru.html
> [6] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2015-July/002122.html

I think this is generally a good change.  The one suggestion I have is to 
adjust the "New upstream microreleases" section slightly.  Starting with the 
last line added in that hunk of the patch:

... it is also generally acceptable to upload new microreleases (~ubuntu-sru 
will make the final determination). The upstream QA process must be 
documented/demonstrated and linked from the SRU tracking bug.  In other cases 
where such upstream automatic testing is not available, exceptions must still 
be approved by at least one member of the Ubuntu Technical Board.

The reason I leave this in is that the proposed language doesn't cover all the 
current micro-release exceptions.  Postfix is an example where we have tests, 
but they don't fit the listed criteria, but I am completely comfortable with 
the mix of upstream fix policy in point releases and our own tests being 
adequate QA to make the MRE that's in place appropriate.

Scott K