This is a bit of a tricky situation I think. Let me elaborate.
We allow new upstream releases for certain projects because of a certain trust
shift - for upstream projects that have a sufficient quality assurance story
and clear bugfix policy, we allow updating the whole version instead of
requiring testing of every single change separately. Basically this is this
section of the policy, even though it's a bit vague:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#New_upstream_microreleases
In this case, when the upstream branch of libreoffice is EOL and us
switching to an unofficial branch with fixes, I think we no longer fit
this policy. We can put certain level of trust to upstream developers
preparing upstream releases, by shifting trust to upstream we can skip
certain parts of our SRU review and verification, simply assuming that -
for instance - the bugfixes listed in the changes are accurate with
what's actually in the tarball. I don't think we can say the same thing
about a version that is officially EOL in the mind of upstream. We
certainly can't blindly trust what's in that codebase, and therefore
just running the usual 'autopkgtests' + usual test-case won't work from
the SRU perspective, sadly.
In this case, I think I only see two options:
a) Switching users of focal to a non-EOL version of libreoffice. This would of
course require much more testing (maybe even a call for testing from other
users), but as you already mentioned on IRC: there is risk that user extensions
would be broken by this. And I think regressing existing users might be a
breach of policy as well... so I'm not sure we can pull this off.
b) Cherry-picking *single fixes* from the aforementioned MIMO branch, each fix
having a separate test-case i.e. following the regular per-bugfix SRU policy.
I know this situation is not ideal, but I don't think we can
realistically do much more. We can pull in more SRU members for comment
though, maybe someone would have a better idea.
** Changed in: libreoffice (Ubuntu Focal)
Status: Triaged => Incomplete
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1929999
Title:
[SRU] libreoffice 6.4.7.2.M3 for Focal
Status in libreoffice package in Ubuntu:
Invalid
Status in libreoffice source package in Focal:
Incomplete
Bug description:
[Impact]
* LibreOffice 6.4.7.2.M3 is a bug-fix release of the 6.4 line:
It receives important bug-fixes on top of the 6.4 branch which is EOL
since November 30, 2020. Currently maintained by Andras Timar for France's MIMO
(https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/06/17/the-document-foundation-welcomes-frances-mimo-in-the-advisory-board/)
* Version 6.4.7 is currently released in focal.
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=distro/mimo/mimo-6-4
(that's a total of ?? bugs)
* Given the nature of the project, the complexity of the codebase and
the high level of quality assurance upstream, it is preferable to SRU
a minor release rather than cherry-pick selected bug fixes.
[Testing]
* Launchpad testing. The libreoffice packages include autopkgtests that were
run and verified as passing.
https://launchpad.net/~ricotz/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+sourcepub/12712294/+listing-archive-extra
* [amd64]
https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-focal-ricotz-ppa/focal/amd64/libr/libreoffice/20210921_030416_a2220@/log.gz
* [arm64]
https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-focal-ricotz-ppa/focal/arm64/libr/libreoffice/20210921_010758_2afcd@/log.gz
* [armhf]
https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-focal-ricotz-ppa/focal/armhf/libr/libreoffice/20210920_223713_b4dfd@/log.gz
* [ppc64el]
https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-focal-ricotz-ppa/focal/ppc64el/libr/libreoffice/20210920_232648_4df4d@/log.gz
* [s390x]
https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-focal-ricotz-ppa/focal/s390x/libr/libreoffice/20210921_020008_6c843@/log.gz
* General smoke testing of all the applications in the office suite
were carried out by going through the manual testplan as documented
by: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Process/Merges/TestPlans/libreoffice
[Regression Potential]
* A minor release with a total of ?? bug fixes always carries the
potential for introducing regressions, even though it is a bug-fix-
only release, meaning that no new features were added, and no existing
features were removed.
* A combination of autopkgtests and careful smoke testing as described
above should provide reasonable confidence that no regressions sneaked
in.
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