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This document describes the policy for updating the rax-nova-agent package to new upstream versions in a stable, supported distro (including LTS releases).

Nova-agent is provided by Rackspace for installation on servers that run in Rackspace Cloud. It is a collection of tools and daemons, packaged as rax-nova-agent, that ensure that the Ubuntu images published to Rackspace Cloud run properly on their platform.

Cloud platforms evolve at a rate that can't be handled in six-month increments, and they will often develop features that they would like to be available to customers who don't want to upgrade from earlier Ubuntu releases. As such, updating rax-nova-agent to more recent upstream releases is required within all Ubuntu releases, so they continue to function properly in their environment.

New versions of rax-nova-agent can be SRU'd in to older releases provided the following process is followed.

QA Process

When a new version of rax-nova-agent is uploaded to -proposed, the following will be done:

• an image including the package from -proposed will be built for Rackspace to be tested in Rackspace Cloud
• the testing that the CPC team normally runs against Rackspace Cloud images before they are published will be run against the -proposed image
• Rackspace's team will be asked to validate
  • that the new package addresses the issues it is expected to address, and
  • that the image passes their internal image validation.

If all the testing indicates that the image containing the new package is acceptable, verification will be considered to be done and the the package can be released from -proposed without waiting for its age reach the default SRU aging requirement.

The rationale behind lifting the aging requirement is that no one is expected to test the package apart from the uploader, Rackspace's team and the CPC team, and they all test the package in the verification process. Verification also includes preparing custom-built images for testing first-booting instances which can't be easily done by others.

Requesting the SRU

The SRU should be done with a single process bug for this stable release exception, instead of individual bug reports for individual bug fixes. However, individual bugs may be referenced in the from the changelog but each of those bugs will need to independently verified and commented on for the SRU to be considered complete.