GNOME had a micro release exception granted by the Technical Board in June 2012. Since the granting of micro release exceptions was made more generic and then decisions delegated to the SRU team directly, the documentation of this exception was removed.
However, GNOME does not meet the new generic terms on the QA requirement. The policy requires a TB exception. Since this was granted previously, including the consideration of QA, we can treat this as "grandfathered".
Therefore, GNOME has a microrelease exception as follows, which applies regardless of the additional QA requirements in the current general MRE policy:
- "GNOME (only the core modules and apps, not the entirety of what is hosted on gnome.org) (approved on 2012-06-22)"
GNOME provides a list of what they consider core as a part of the release. The lists are found at https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/$GNOME_VERSION/versions (eg: https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/42.0/versions). A Debian maintainer produces a helpfully-parsed version of this list with upstream names matched to source package names at https://people.debian.org/~fpeters/gnome/debian-gnome-42-status.html. (Older GNOME versions are also available, but these do not have the upstream name->source package transformation applied).
- In addition GNOME-provided lists, we additionally consider the following packages to be under the MRE exception:
- evolution
- evolution-ews
- file-roller
- gedit
- gnome-terminal
- gnome-tweaks
- seahorse
- everything that the gnome-games apt package directly depends on
As an exception to the GNOME-provided list, vala is not covered by this MRE. Relevant bug fixes to vala are rare, and require special handling (as all rdepends must be rebuilt for any fixes to be picked up).
Additionally, GNOME Shell and mutter are not covered by this MRE, as GNOME Shell and mutter upstream no longer have the same understanding of point releases we do. These packages also have special regression potential, and any SRUs to these packages need to test the following:
Updates to gnome-shell are at risk of regressing packages providing gnome-shell extensions as we discovered in the case of LP: #1892245. For Ubuntu 22.04, most shell extensions have been removed from the archive, and all remaining ones must be smoke-tested as a part of any gnome-shell SRUs.
- Prior to 23.10 mutter is a shared critical component with Ubuntu Budgie. Mutter SRUs to 22.04 and earlier must be tested against the Budgie session in addition to the Ubuntu/Ubuntu on Xorg/GNOME/GNOME Classic sessions.
SRU-team tooling to automatically check if a package falls under the GNOME MRE is in progress. Until that is complete, the following lists are authoritative for MRE purposes:
Testing
An appropriate test plan varies according to the package.
The desktop team will maintain specific test plans at CategoryDesktopTestPlans. If a test plan is for a particular package is provided there, then it should be followed during SRU verification for SRUs performed under this exception.
Such test plans are subject to review and approval by the SRU team. Once a test plan is reviewed, an SRU team member will add an approval note to the page. It is possible to determine if an approval is still valid by comparing the note against the "last edited" timestamp and username at the bottom right of the page. If a test plan has been improved since the approval, then changes should be reconsidered and reapproved by the SRU team the next time an SRU for that particular package is reviewed.
If a test plan is approved by the SRU team, then it can be expected that in the common case the SRU team won't require further review changes to it (ie. to avoid "bikeshedding"). Exceptions: if something substantial has changed since the approval, or if a significant gap is identified or otherwise noticed by an SRU team member.
If there is no standard test plan, then ad-hoc test plans in individual bugs are acceptable, but these will require individual negotiation with SRU team members every time, and so may incur additional review iteration delays.