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This document describes the policy for updating Landscape client packages in a stable supported distro, including LTS. It is also the aim of this document to provide an example for any upstream project that wants to push updates to an Ubuntu stable release.

Landscape is a commercial service from Canonical which periodically offers new features to its customers. Being a client-server product, the client part needs to be periodically updated in order to take advantage of the new features. Therefore, in addition to bug fixes, new features are allowed in an update as long as the conditions outlined below are met.

QA Process

This is the mandatory QA process that the proposed packages have to pass. The following requirements must be met:

• each change must have a Launchpad ticket filed under the landscape-client project (https://bugs.launchpad.net/landscape-client/+filebug). Packaging bugs should be filed against the landscape-client ubuntu package (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/landscape-client/+filebug)

• each one of those tickets must have:
  • a bzr branch attached with the fix + tests
  • two Landscape developer reviews approving the change (already a standard Landscape coding practice)
  • a specific QA review. The QA engineer must at least do a before and after kind of test, corroborating the fix.
  • a "Committed" status, meaning the change is already in the code base
• all the code changes must be covered by tests

• all self tests must pass. Being a project that follows the TDD model (Test Driven Development, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_driven_development for details), any code change in Landscape (client or server) is covered by a test. The client part has, as of version 1.0.23, 1469 individual test cases that cover the entire code base.

The above tests exercise the code changes and must be performed by a member of the Landscape team. The packaging changes need an extra QA procedure outlined below.

Packaging QA

The objective of the separate packaging QA is to test:

• package upgrades
• package installation from scratch
• distribution upgrade

The resulting package, with all the changes in place, must undergo and pass the following additional QA procedures:

• upgrade test from previous distribution to the current one. If the current distribution is an LTS one, the upgrade path from the previous LTS distro must also be exercised.
• upgrade test from previous version of the package. This test must be performed with:
  • apt-get install/upgrade
  • using the Landscape service itself
• installation from scratch in the current distribution:
  • using apt-get
• test interaction with update-motd to make sure the motd doesn't get trashed or otherwise impaired by landscape-common:
  • reboot and make sure motd is displayed correctly and not trashed
  • when update-motd is used by landscape-sysinfo (it's the default), make sure its call to landscape-sysinfo works and the output is included in the motd

  • provoke an error (backtrace) in landscape-sysinfo plugin by running sudo chmod 0 /proc: the backtrace must not be included in the motd

The above tests can be performed by any QA engineer.

Requesting the SRU

The SRU should be requested as usual (StableReleaseUpdates) with the additional note about having the above steps being completed.