ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a follow-up to previous threads; please read those first:

  https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg08410.html
  https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg09051.html

= What's happened so far? =

We've been very busy over the last few weeks implementing the archive
management plan for RTM.  Last week we performed a successful dry-run of
the distribution branch procedure on Launchpad's "dogfood" instance
(which we use for QA of the upload, build, and publish subsystems); of
course we found and fixed a few bugs along the way, but overall it was
quite smooth.

We have a dashboard in place
(http://ci.ubuntu.com/smokeng/utopic/touch_stable/), which looks
plausible with the exception of a few failures that indicate missing
packages in the branch.

The remaining thing to finish here is completing the dry-run of CI Train
against RTM (Łukasz is working on this).  After that we can consider the
dry-run complete.

Exactly when we branch is still a matter of some debate.  The competing
pressures are that we need to branch early enough that we have time to
shake out bugs in the new infrastructure, but late enough that engineers
are spending a minimum of time on extra landing effort.  Furthermore,
I'm on vacation from 13-18 August, and while I have a backup, it would
really be better for me to be around if possible to make sure things
aren't exploding.  That suggests a provisional branch date of the week
of 4-8 August.  If this is a problem, please give detailed reasons.


= How will branching work for upstreams? =

The archive branch will be cut from the point in the Ubuntu archive's
overall history corresponding to the most recent promoted image.  This
will result in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-rtm/14.09 or similar, and
I'll send a report with the full list of initial source package
versions.

We don't have a central way to make branches of all upstream projects
involved.  It's also not really necessary to do so; it's fine for
upstreams to make a branch when they first need to land something for
RTM.  You'd take the version of the package in question in the RTM
archive, then branch from the corresponding tag, push, and create a new
project series in Launchpad so that something like
lp:yourproject/rtm-14.09 works (the exact name isn't very important, but
it probably ought to contain "rtm" and "14.09" somewhere).  You'll then
tell the landing team which branch you want to land any given silo on;
ideally that will be in the spreadsheet, but if not we'll at least be
able to select it manually.

In general you will be required to land things for devel-proposed before
attempting to land them for stable-proposed, in order that we don't lose
changes (bearing in mind that we'll want to move on to a new branch a
few months down the line).  There will no doubt be the occasional
deadline-driven exception, but the exceptions should not be common
practice.


Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]