Comment 12 for bug 1864613

The policy says:

"In other cases where such upstream automatic testing is not available, exceptions must still be approved by at least one member of the Ubuntu Technical Board."

So yes, you can ask for an exception. If you want to do that, I suggest that you point technical-board@ at this bug.

> ...or do we need to instead do one of...

I think you'd need to do both of what you have listed there. You might want to pick the most important fixes to cherry-pick, rather than all of them.

> My concern is that having a pulling in individual commits creates a version of Xfwm that doesn’t otherwise exist and is only supported by Xubuntu and not the upstream. It also leads to more work later if any of the unincluded bug fixes need to be fixed later.

You're certainly not the only one who has made this argument. Note though that this concern applies equally to *any* package being updated under this Ubuntu policy. In effect, you're saying that you disagree with the policy in principle, rather than presenting a specific case for why the policy should be set aside for you in this particular case due to some exceptional circumstance.

You're entitled to disagree with Ubuntu policy, and discussion to change the policy if it is no longer appropriate is also welcome. But if the project were to agree with you on this specific concern, then I think it would make sense to change the policy itself rather than grant an exception on the basis of this specific argument. Doing otherwise would be a contradiction of the policy itself.

There is a separate question here of what to do where automated tests are difficult or don't make sense, as is the case I think with a GUI. Maybe an exception could be discussed on this basis, or even a general policy exception for GUIs.

I would like to point out that you're not being blocked from fixing this bug pending further discussion here. If fixing this bug soon is important to you, you can just cherry-pick the fix using the normal SRU process.