I'd like to present my personal opinion on Steve's points below. It is unfortunate that I didn't get the opportunity to discuss this with him first. It had been in my "things to talk to Steve about" queue, but always lower priority than other matters when we synced, unfortunately. Now that's not an option and it came up in the TB meeting again so I must resort to continuing the thread for the benefit of others.
On Wed, Dec 20, 2023 at 10:26:03AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Wed, Dec 20, 2023 at 05:04:50PM +0000, Robie Basak wrote: > > As a member of the Technical Board who is not on the Release Team, it > > always struck me as odd that the TB is responsible for determining which > > flavours qualify for the LTS label. > > > Personally, if someone from the release team says it's OK, then I agree. > > I don't think I have anything to add or change. I don't think I have any > > expertise or considered opinion to add in this area that I'd routinely > > want to provide any input that the release team has not already done. > I do not want to see this delegated to the Release Team. The Release Team > is structured entirely as a technical team, and has no decision-making > processes for questions like this. And I do not want the Release Team to be > in the position of having to tell a flavor "no" if they have not met the LTS > criteria. IMHO, the Release Team *should* develop decision-making processes for questions like this. I don't think *everyone* in a given team must take this kind of thing on. Not everyone wants to "be that person", and that's fine. But I think it's necessary for some subset of the team to be able to make this kind of decision in order to remain effective. > If there are disagreements about whether a flavor is eligible for LTS > status, I think it's precisely the mandate of the TB to deal with such > conflict, not the Release Team. Members of the TB have, in essence, signed > up for this kind of work; Release Team members have not. I do agree that having some distance can help. Michael suggested in the TB meeting earlier: "i am also sort of fine with the situation where the release team makes the decision in effect but relies on the TB to tell people about it". So I'm open to some kind of middle ground. > I think the > consequence of delegating this to the Release Team is that we will have > poorer adherence, and as a result worse releases, because the Release Team > will tend to avoid the emotionally draining work of saying no (and having > their authority challenged) and instead end up having to do more work on > behalf of any flavors that are not delivering on their obligations to be > self-sustaining. I agree that this is a risk, but I think that's a challenge the Release Team should take on - I don't think it should be for the Technical Board to directly drive. Ultimately, if the Release Team is unable to say no, then we may have problems with flavor quality if the boundaries get pushed, but that's something that the Release Team has to deal with in other areas already. To me, it doesn't make sense for the team that should logically hold the responsibility from an organisational perspective to end up delegating it upwards. The TB can provide support, of course, if there's a problem with undue pressure or other unreasonableness, by recognising that for what it is if any escalation is made. > You might point out that the Release Team actually is in the business of > saying "no" all the time, in the context of freeze exceptions. But the > dynamic is different there, the stakes are much lower, and if there is > contention it is much more likely to be resolvable via discussion of > technical trade-offs. Steve anticipated my response very well here :) IMHO, flavour LTS criteria doesn't seem all that different from saying "no" to a freeze exception request. The HWE kernel re-roll for a point release is a recent example that I think makes this point more strongly: the Release Team must deal with this kind of pressure in their decision-making already. I think I just weigh this up differently, and think that the different cases are similar enough that it will out better for the Release Team to take the primary responsibility, though with the support of the Technical Board as required. Robie
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