Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 23:16:16 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NO MORE '-BETA' Message-ID: <p0501040db6d8923b0e1f@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.010316181429.jhb@FreeBSD.org> References: <XFMail.010316181429.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
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At 6:14 PM -0800 3/16/01, John Baldwin wrote: >On 17-Mar-01 Jordan Hubbard wrote: > > As you can see, both OSREL and OSVERSION can be set in > > /etc/make.conf or the command line to override the > > default setting. > >Actually, the biggest problem in the past has been configure >scripts which call uname directly and try to parse the output, >so setting OSREL or OSVERSION doesn't help at all there. :) > >Just committing it to the tree is a rather simple way of >achieving all of this. For what it's worth, I am 100% convinced that it is very worthwhile that SOME kind of name-change occur at the point that we currently change to -beta. I do believe there are very practical and worthwhile benefits. >It would be nice to also know how many people are confused >vs. how many people _aren't_ confused. If 2% of our >-stable userbase doesn't get it, then I'm not sure that is >justification for axeing it. I do not want to axe it. I just want to use a different combination of letters. There is no one who has given a TECHNICAL reason that we must use the specific four letters of 'beta' to denote this stage in the release cycle. Many good reasons (IMO) have been offered for why SOME name change should occur, but not one as to why those specific letters must be used. I think we can benefit (or at least, reassure) that tiny 2% of our user population without doing one single bit of harm in any way, shape or form to the other 98%. We can change from using "beta" to using "pre-release" by typing in about two dozen letters. If it takes so little effort to improve something for even 0.2% of our users, without hurting any of the rest of our users, then why would we not JUST DO IT? Why are we expending tens of thousands of characters arguing about it? -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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