Priorities

Summary

The Ubuntu Engineering team in Canonical is committing a rotation of developers to work solely on development release maintenance for a month or two at a time, with the goal of keeping the development release buildable, installable, and upgradeable at all times in order to allow other developers to work with fewer interruptions. What should our priorities be? How should we organise ourselves? Given the alignment between this and e.g. the historical activities of MOTU, how can we build community participation or link into existing activities?

Release Note

This is not a user-visible specification.

Design

To start with, the team's priorities will be roughly as follows:

  1. Deal with ISO smoke test issues. This includes making sure that install images are buildable. Rationale: affects anyone trying to bootstrap themselves onto the new release; impedes many other tests; first priority for milestone release preparation.

  2. Ensure that upgrades through the development release work day to day (e.g. using the conflict checker). Rationale: directly affects users of the development release.

  3. Ensure that all packages in main are installable. Rationale: directly affects users of the development release.

  4. Ensure that all packages in main are buildable. Rationale: impedes velocity of landing changes.

  5. Process component-mismatches / MIRs / etc. Rationale: often causes install/upgrade problems.

  6. Finish library/NBS transitions through archive (beyond main). Rationale: often causes install/upgrade/build problems.

  7. Ensure that out-of-date binaries are removed from the archive, cleaning up associated build failures where necessary. Rationale: we shouldn't be shipping binaries that don't correspond to source we're shipping, and doing so also gets in the way of post-release updates.

  8. Ensure that all packages in the archive are buildable. Rationale: impedes velocity of landing changes; packages in universe are often the subject of user/customer requests even if not fully supported.

Infrastructure development will happen at least as a background task.

Other

There was a request for a scan of all preinst scripts in the archive for dpkg-maintscript-helper without dpkg pre-depends (serious LTS upgrade issue), to be turned into a report that gets regularly driven to 0. This would be a perfect application of Lintian, especially now that we have an Ubuntu instance set up.


CategorySpec

PlusOneMaintenanceTeam/Specs/Priorities (last edited 2014-07-01 13:32:01 by cjwatson)