Comment 9 for bug 1305839

Thanks all for the comments and discussion.

Responding to some key points:

 * building confidence in code changes both for this FFE and subsequent SRUs is important, the archive and RM teams have a mandate to seek comfort on that front before ack'ing an upload under either circumstances

 * in other words - thank you for calling out the late change :)

 * I have asked and the MAAS team have assured that all SRU changes will come with appropriate test suites

 * I would expect to see a test suite for this change and would expect that test suite to have been run on the appropriate hardware. Separately, we'll arrange to have MAAS CI and testing integrated to the OIL lab, which has a rapidly growing range of hardware.

 * installing the necessary drivers is the norm in the linux environment; warning the user about the consequences of this is the norm in the Ubuntu environment.

 * I'd ask that we accept this FFE once tests are in place, or if needed, with a commitment to tests as a zero-day SRU

 * I'd ask that the MAAS team commit to flagging the installation of such drivers in the MAAS node UI, possibly also with a flag on the node listing

 * all of this assumes the existence of a setting which enables a system administrator to tell MAAS not to do this by default on any given machine without explicit approval

As general guidance, this is an area that will evolve fast in the coming months and years, so I've asked the MAAS team to keep developing on 14.04 LTS as their primary platform, introducing no dependencies that are not in 14.04, so we can SRU. If we need to move to universe to make that more comfortable for the release team, let's do that. We got stuck in 12.04 with old versions of key tools that should have been moved - stuck because of bad thinking on the deps front, and perceived dogma on the RM front. We can do better this time by requiring rigorous CI and testing on SRUs, and being sensible about deps. That goes for maas, juju and related tools, all of which need to be current and useful in the coming two years.