Comment 6 for bug 1741390

Hi Christian,

On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 07:25:16AM -0000, ChristianEhrhardt wrote:
> In the sense that you describe it about every package in Xenial is now
> "two years out of date", because the policy to not break on what users
> already use has a lot of implicatons [1]

> One tries to address bug-fixes in an isolated testable way as good as
> possible, but such a major update is rare. Even minor release updates
> (less bumps than this case) have to follow a very strict process with
> [2] as examples.

> The way out of this is [3] where people can prepare newer versions
> without affecting the world as it is mostly opt-in and thereby not
> affecting the majority of users who consider themselves safe by the SRU
> policy.
>
> I currently have no cycles to spare on this, so if this is urgent for
> you I wanted to ask if you are willing and able to start driving this
> bug along the Ubuntu Backport Process [4]?
>
> [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
> [2]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Documentation_for_Special_Cases
> [3]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
> [4]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports

With my SRU team hat on, I will say that open-vm-tools clearly falls into
the class of packages that have a "platform enablement" (née "hardware
enablement") exception to the usual bugfix-only rule.

Care must of course still be taken to test the updates and avoid
regressions, but in cases where the package must be updated from upstream to
maintain compatibility with the moving target of the OS's substrate (whether
that's hardware, or a cloud platform, or a VM platform), the requirement to
selectively cherry-pick bugfixes is waived.