Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 13:51:23 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net> Cc: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>, Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk>, Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.ORG>, Joseph Scott <joseph.scott@owp.csus.edu>, Brian Somers <brian@FreeBSD.ORG>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/usr.bin/finger finger.c Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1001003125837.89537E-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <20001003124008.A4892@netmonger.net>
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On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Christopher Masto wrote: > The problem with being too cautious is that stable becomes unusable > and people who shouldn't be running current start moving to it because > stable doesn't support their new laptop. > > I think it's important to push _some_ features into stable. Having to > wait several years for the next major "point-oh" release of FreeBSD > (which comes with "point-oh fear" holding it back) is not the best > way to do things. IMO. There's a place between these two extremes > of paranoia and wild abandon, and I think that's where the MFCs should > take place. There's certainly a middle ground, and we can't expect that it will necessarily keep everyone happy, but that middle ground would hopefully avoid the current situation. Time-testing of features, as well as peer review, are both extremely important aspects of stable and secure development. Several times over the last few months, we've seen things merged into -STABLE leaving it in an ususable state for days at a time. This is clearly not desirable. Similarly, we've seen things added to both -CURRENT and -STABLE without substantial review in advance of the commit. No one is questioning the qualifications of our committers, but I think it's the case that, in general, no single committer should rely on only their own review of code: a second pair of eyes goes a long way, and there's nothing like a few weeks of being burned in before backporting a change to -STABLE. It would be unfair of us to expect every line of code that is written to be perfect, but it is fair of us to expect that code be carefully reviewed for inclusion before it gets included in the release version of software deployed on hundreds of thousands of machines. We should be equally careful about changes in -CURRENT, of course, as -CURRENT has a nasty habit if becoming -STABLE every year or two :-). The FreeBSD development process is constantly evolving: expectations of high quality play an important role in that evolution. Robert N M Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1 TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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