From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Nov 17 14:52:17 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 967D837B401 for ; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:52:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from smtp.netcologne.de (smtp.netcologne.de [194.8.194.112]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E5B4443E77 for ; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:52:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tmseck-usenet@netcologne.de) Received: from mail.tmseck.homedns.org (xdsl-213-168-116-14.netcologne.de [213.168.116.14]) by smtp.netcologne.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 337508671E for ; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 23:52:09 +0100 (MET) Received: by mail.tmseck.homedns.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id E5539286A5; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 23:52:08 +0100 (CET) From: Thomas Seck To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: -STABLE was stable for long time (Re: FreeBSD: Server or Desktop OS?) Organization: private site In-Reply-To: <20021117164707.T23359-100000@hub.org> Reply-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Attribution: tms Mail-Copies-To: nobody Message-Id: <20021117225208.E5539286A5@mail.tmseck.homedns.org> Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 23:52:08 +0100 (CET) Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Marc G. Fournier (scrappy@hub.org): > What's to track? Nothing happens on that branch ... I just CVSup'd > RELEASE, followed by RELENG_4_7 and the only changes were pretty much > related to the latest BIND vulnerabilities ... The "security branches" are fortunately a very slowly moving target for which you can develop and maintain *your* *own* patches. What stops you from doing just this? What keeps you from applying Matt Dillons VM patches to RELENG_4_7? What keeps you from merging new features from -STABLE into your private RELENG-branch? You have chosen to maintain systems which stretch FreeBSD to its limits and uncover bugs lurking in the code. This is great. But you cannot do so on the one hand and refuse to face the administrative work on the other hand. This does not work. You have the freedom to maintain your own release with all the patches and fixes you need. Why don't you do it? Instead you waste your time with complaining (and you waste my time because I have to read it and think about the replies I am going to send)? As for the eroding stability: this is partly true, in my opinion because -CURRENT and -STABLE's codebases have diverted to a great extent. There were so many new CURRENT-only features implemented in the last few months (SMPng, KSE, GCC update, GEOM, ...) which caused more or less grief and instability for a long time. My guess is, that due to this no one using -CURRENT had time to test features which were to be MFC'ed extensively. And due to the ongoing instability of -CURRENT there were probably not enough non-developer users with -CURRENT systems for testing, so probably most things MFC'ed in the last few months got their first round of thorough testing by a wide user base just after the MFC. Anyone remember the ata(4) trouble? I do not know whether the above was true when RELENG_3 was -STABLE; I use FreeBSD only since 4.0. But I think that it could not have been that bad, since I found 4.0 "useable". As it seems 5.0 will be shipped with big red warning signs attached :) > Purely security vulnerabilities ... no 'critical patches' ... I would > consider most anything related to the VM subsystem to be 'critical', at > the very least ... Please discuss this with the security officer. --Thomas To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message