Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 04:38:29 -0800 From: "David E. Tweten" <tweten@frihet.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATTENTION: Call for opinion re: root device naming change Message-ID: <199803181238.EAA00522@ns.frihet.com>
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mike@smith.net.au said:
> - Keep; we have already deployed and changing back would be expensive.
Okay, not very expensive. I've installed it on both my work and home
machines, and was one of the people reporting problems with the installation
(in my case, the product of confusion and a bit of foot shooting on my part).
> - Keep; the new approach allows us extra flexibility and consistency.
I understand that this change is supposed to make it easier to support two
FreeBSD bootable slices on one disk. Since I am beginning to explore ways of
making my work machine automatically upgrade itself on "the other slice"
every weekend, this change looks like progress to me.
Does it have rough edges? Sand them off before 2.2.6-RELEASE.
Documentation? Of course. A step-by-step procedure should be provided with
the release showing exactly what you have to do. I hope I'm not the most
easily confused person, and I was confused by the original HEADS UP message
and its implications for my "dangerously dedicated" machine. And I still
haven't seen an explanation of how to specify a second boot slice from the
boot prompt. The boot prompt doesn't seem to have the syntax to support
that. In the release, it should. Rough edges. Apply sandpaper.
In an attempt to learn something larger from this, I'd like to somewhat
seriously suggest a new release procedure to Jordan:
1. Whatever you do, don't announce anything to anybody yet. Tell no one.
Pick a night, arbitrarily.
2. Sneak into Walnut Creek in the dead of night, alone, and tag whatever's
there in STABLE as the next release.
3. Announce to the world that there is a new release, and that new
submissions
to STABLE are encouraged.
Absolutely the worst thing any developer can do is to rush code into a
release at the last minute. The current practice of announcing release code
freezes encourages precisely that bad behavior. The result to a long time CD
subscriber like myself is that I have _never_ received a FreeBSD CD that is
useful to me by itself. There always seems to be some ugly bug discovered
within a month of the CD going to press that requires me to use the CD only
as a bootstrap method to get to current STABLE -- which is always reasonably
stable, unless Jordan has announced a code freeze recently.
--
David E. Tweten | 2047-bit PGP fingerprint: | tweten@frihet.com
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