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This document describes the policy for updating the Postfix package in a stable supported distro, in particular LTS releases.

Quoting the Technical Board meeting minutes (2011-10-06):

"Upstream has tight requirements for what goes into stable microreleases, QAs them with regression tests, and has a good history of not breaking anything. Known breakage so far was in the packaging. Our QA regression testing repository has an existing integration test script which should be run on the proposed packages for checking for general mis-builds, packaging errors, etc."

The mentioned integration test script is already included in the Postfix source package.

Here Postfix exception was added to the old StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions wiki page.

Process

The aim is to be able to include upstream patch level microreleases in supported stable releases, specially LTS ones. Those microreleases include bug fixes reported by users which should improve the quality of the package and overall user experience.

To do this we will, once the need to include an upstream microrelease in a stable release comes up:

1. File (or find) a bug to cover the upgrade. This bug might be related to one of the bugs fixed in the proposed microrelease, or a bug dedicated to the microrelease update.
2. Fix all the bugs tackled in the microrelease in the current development series of Ubuntu.
3. Once the package containing the bug fixes migrates to the release pocket of the current development series, the microrelease can be uploaded to the SRU queue.

We will use the bug mentioned in 1 for the SRU but this need not include detailed test case or regression potential sections (it should link to this page for the sake of the SRU team member doing the review!).

QA

As hinted above, we will not do amazingly extensive QA, upstream does that already. And the package also has a good regression test executed by autopkgtest which can catch breakages.

This QA should happen both for the -proposed -> -release migration in the devel series and again as part of the SRU verification.