launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 04:54:03PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> How will uploads to this new derived distribution get back into
> Ubuntu?

I think I said something about this in my original mail, but I want to
set a rule that nothing gets into the derived distribution without being
in Ubuntu first (even if not completely landed, they should at least be
in the process, e.g. in -proposed), so it's purely a stabilisation
branch without new work of its own.  I had considerable support from
relevant managers last week for this being a general rule, although the
people doing the direct customer engagement note that there may be some
urgent cases where it won't work out.  As far as I can tell we should be
able to make sure that those are exceptions rather than the rule.

When the branch closes, I intend to check through it to ensure that
everything has landed in Ubuntu.  If the archive permissions all match
up, then it should be OK to copy source+binaries back on the grounds
that the same set of people were allowed to upload and review it;
otherwise, a few manually-checked source uploads shouldn't be a big
deal.

Canonical is, as far as I can make out, strongly committed to making
sure that it's possible to continue rolling production phones forward to
newer versions without having to maintain lots of long-lived
per-customer branches, which implies making sure that everything in
stable branches also lands in mainline.  That makes me confident that
this won't be forgotten even if I get hit by a bus or something.

> Will uploads to this new derived distribution be limited to Ubuntu
> developers?  If not, how is this being controlled?

I would very much like the permissions on the derived distribution to be
set to exactly match those on Ubuntu, and the permissions on the derived
series to exactly match those on utopic, so that there's no uncertainty
about whether it's safe to copy packages back and forward.  It's not
meant to be a laxer version of the primary archive, but if anything err
in the opposite direction.

Most landings will be taking place using the CI engine, so the same
issues apply as in the recent conversation on ubuntu-devel.  I expect
that by that point we will be using the ground-up rewrite of the engine
that's currently in preparation, and hopefully the task to ensure that
all uploads have some kind of review from somebody with LP
Archive.checkUpload() permission on the package will be completed by
then, at which point there should be no awkward grey areas.  That said,
if that task isn't done, or if the CI work slips so that we're still
using the current "CI Train" engine by then, it's no worse than the
situation today.

We'll presumably also need some version of the IRC notifications that
#ubuntu-release currently gets on queue and image events.  I have no
very strong opinion on whether those should be on #ubuntu-release to
keep everything consolidated (especially if the permissions are set to
match so that the same people have access to handle them), or whether
that's too much noise that many of the denizens there don't care about.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]