Comment 43 for bug 201673

We are investigating what happened here (in terms of processes) and will make testing improvements as a result. I don't want to go into details prematurely.

Of course, resource-hungry testing measures are always a trade-off between development efficiency and safety. Ubuntu has derived great benefit in the past from being able to push uploads through quickly (so that many iterations can be run over the course of a working day), and I'm cautious about imposing mandatory delays that would slow that process down too badly. There are clearly much more lightweight measures that would achieve significant safety improvements, and we're likely to look at those first.

We will probably also ramp up our warnings about the development release not being suitable for production use. The object of the development release, whether leading up to an LTS or not, is not to build confidence; it is to produce a high-quality end result - and I do believe that the root cause of this change (LDFLAGS=-Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions) will provide significant benefits elsewhere. Yes, it is a shame that it blew up here, but on the bright side this is far enough before release that we have time for intensive testing to ensure that nothing else important is going to blow up in the same way.

It's very common for the reaction to failures to be to impose a much greater testing load on developers and/or development processes. You can increase testing to an unbounded extent, though, and clearly you hit diminishing returns at some point; even at that point, in our imperfect world, you'll still get failures. Thus we need to consider trade-offs and efficiency rather than simply saying "more testing please"; rest assured that that consideration will happen.

I do not want to discuss testing further on this bug report. Please take further discussion to development mailing lists.