Mesa update as SRU?

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Timo,

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:49:49PM +0300, Timo Aaltonen wrote:
>   Mesa has a standing MRE, but upstream changed their release cadence
> last year from a major release every 6 months to less-major releases
> every 3 months..

> Now with trusty we're in a less-than-optimal situation that support for
> Intel Broadwell will be completed in the next release scheduled for May
> 30th, while trusty has 10.1 from late February. Trying to backport
> support for BDW to 10.1 has proven to get out of control pretty quick
> with 50+ commits and counting, and still seeing brokenness not on master.

> So I'm asking if it would be possible to have an exception with mesa,
> allowing a bigger update to land as SRU after sufficient testing for
> regressions has been done on both T+1 and -proposed. We have piglit as a
> test suite to spot obvious regressions, and ways to gather wider testing
> from the community when it's looking good enough from our side.

> This would allow a more sane way to provide BDW support in 14.04.1 than
> backporting a big pile of commits and maintaining the franken-mesa
> ourselves..

Is 14.04.1 the right time frame to be targetting Broadwell support, or
should we be aiming for 14.04.2 instead?  I.e., would this fit better the
normal point release hardware enablement stack process?

I am in general not happy with the idea of all users being given a new
version of mesa via SRU, because it's very difficult to ensure that the
package doesn't introduce regressions.  "Community testing" is always
self-selecting, and for a package with as broad an impact as this, I don't
think it will be adequately tested without an explicit test plan that
details our hardware coverage.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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