Stretch freeze and the possible future upload of MATE 1.18

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On 09/10/16 00:22, Mike Gabriel wrote:
> Hi Vlad,
> 
> thanks for taking this initiative of communication. Much appreciated.
> 
> I try to give some answers, Niels may jump in and correct me, if necessary.
> 
> On  Fr 07 Okt 2016 14:51:47 CEST, Vlad Orlov wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>>> It depends on what the MATE release includes. If it involves a
>>> transition (e.g. ABI / API bumps), then you are looking at 5th of
>>> November as deadline.
>>
>> Hmm... does it mean changes in soname of some library from MATE
>> that will cause package name change? E.g. libmate-desktop-2.so ->
>> libmate-desktop-3.so, then package libmate-desktop-2-17 would have
>> its name changed too.
> 
> Yes. And all packages build-depending on libmate-desktop-dev would require to be
> rebuilt.
> 
> In MATE this is non-criticial as long as only MATE packages B-D on
> libmate-desktop-dev. But if there is any package outside of the Debian MATE
> team's scope, then this gets nasty so close to the freeze.

In theory, that is irrelevant. A library transition is a library transition, and
the transition freeze is on November the 5th. So if you have a library that
bumps the SONAME, then you should do that before that date.

>> Or does something else count as transition? E.g. if some of MATE
>> packages would change dependency from libmateweather to libgweather.
> 
> No. This should be fine.

That's fine indeed. Porting your apps (or even libraries, as long as you don't
break the ABI) from a library to another, e.g. from mateweather to libgweather,
or from libunique to GtkApplication is fine.

>>> Otherwise, I strongly recommend using early/mid-December as the latest
>>> deadline upstream.  That way the MATE packaging has 2-3 weeks to get it
>>> uploaded plus another 2-3 to fix any bugs without any extra hassle.  I
>>> assume here that there is no need for new packages (based on your input
>>> below).
>>
>> Yes, there's no plan to add new packages into MATE.
> 
> Ok. Good.
> 
>> So December means we need to meet soft freeze date (2017-01-05)?
>> That is, if we already handled the transitions.
> 
> By this date, packages have to be landed in testing. So, they have to be
> uploaded to unstable "a couple of days" earlier. With the last freeze for
> jessie, there was 10 days delay for the migration of packages from unstable to
> testing. IIRC.
> 
>> Are new upstream versions allowed into Testing between soft freeze
>> and full freeze (provided that these are only new versions, not new
>> packages)?
> 
> IIRC, this was possible with review by someone from the release team. As the
> MATE upstream team is really careful and minimal with the changes in point
> release, I'd say all potential upstream releases of MATE within one release
> series (i.e. within 1.16 or 1.18) would be good candidates for receiving
> permission to be uploaded.

Review is required after the full freeze (a freeze exception). Between soft
freeze and full freeze, a new version can be uploaded, but beware of the 10 day
migration delay, possible build failures, RC bugs, new dependencies... that
could delay your package migration. So don't upload 10 days before the freeze,
do it with more margin as to allow for any necessary fixes.

So yes, I'd suggest to get everything released and uploaded sometime in
December, to then have a little time to get everything migrated.

Cheers,
Emilio