From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Dec 17 01:10:51 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id BAA08830 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 17 Dec 1995 01:10:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [192.216.222.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id BAA08820 Sun, 17 Dec 1995 01:10:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id BAA07750; Sun, 17 Dec 1995 01:10:07 -0800 To: Andreas Klemm cc: current@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org, cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de, jkh@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD-current-stable ??? In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 17 Dec 1995 09:22:15 +0100." Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 01:10:07 -0800 Message-ID: <7748.819191407@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > When speaking with people like Martin Cracauer, then I get > the impression, that possibly more people would be interested > to help in FreeBSD developement. Perhaps developing additional > features, too. But they only have one machine, which shouldn't > get into a very unstable state. > > So how could one attract more people, to work on the bleeding > edge, without loosing stability too much ??!! I think the answer is pretty simple: People committing to -current need to get their acts together and stop destabilising it so much. Yes, that's a somewhat sharply worded statement, but I think that the split into 2.1 and 2.2 has been taken by some to be implicit permission for a "free for all" in -current, and that was NEVER the intention of that branch! If you've got something truly whacked-out experimental to bring in then you're supposed to test it out on your own machine(s) to the level where it, as an absolute minimum, does not make the system unusable. If you can't reasonably guarantee this, then it should stay in your local tree until you can. As Andreas notes here, having an unstable -current is very counter-productive and only leads people away from wanting to run it at all (I haven't updated my own -current system for a week or so, for exactly this reason). That somewhat defeats the purpose of -current, which is to be a *final* testing ground for features. It's not a dumping ground for half-baked and untested ideas that break existing functionality. If you've got something truly left-field that you want to bring in and it doesn't effect other parts of the system as a whole, then the rules are perhaps somewhat more flexible, but this definitely doesn't apply to changes to existing features. I think that the idea of further branching of FreeBSD into -experimental and -current is not a good one, for various reasons: 1. It would only encourage more mayhem in -experimental, quickly leading to an unmanagable mess that nobody in their right minds would want to run anyway (and if that's the case, then what's the point of committing something to a central location? Just keep it in your own tree until it's ready). 2. It would fragment work even more. People would be confused as to where to commit, what with all these possible options. 3. Somebody would be stuck with merging changes between 3 branches instead of two, and two is already becoming close to unmanagable (just ask David). Sorry to be so acidic, but I really do think that this needed to be said, and messages like Andreas's here would only serve to indicate that -current is way out of control. We need to regain some of the credibility we've lost here, not make the problem even worse! Jordan