Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 22:17:45 -0700 From: "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com> To: bmah@freebsd.org Cc: "Miroslav Pendev" <shadow@CPE0004761ac738-CM00109515bc65.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com>, "questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, "Matthew Plews" <plews@bigpond.net.au> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.6 Install Problem Message-ID: <20020619051745323.AAA639@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com> In-Reply-To: <200206190423.g5J4NpdJ038914@intruder.bmah.org> References: <20020619011031327.AAA637@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com>
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Quick followup, more important stuff near bottom. On 18 Jun 2002, at 21:23, Bruce A. Mah boldly uttered: > If memory serves me right, "Philip J. Koenig" wrote: > > > Good point. If people were seriously talking over on -security about > > a new ISO to incorporate that Apache patch, > > None of those people were on the release engineering or port manager > teams, which are the bodies who would be ultimately responsible for > doing the work. :-p Fair enough, I didn't see the thread. > > I'd definitely suggest > > releasing 4.6a with something to allow new installers to turn on the > > DMA switch before running the install from an IDE CDROM. > > I wrote an errata note with a workaround for this, and posted a pointer > to stable@ earlier today. Feedback is encouraged before I commit this > to the release documentation and Web site, hopefully in the next day or > so: > > http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/doc/errata/article.pdf > > It sounds like you had something more automatic in mind. This involves > code that doesn't exist. Until someone writes it, this is a moot point. OK, I figured some install script could just pause and set a variable rather than going right into sysinstall, but I'm not familiar with what it would entail to do that. > (Better would be to get sos@ a block of time and the right equipment to > troubleshoot this problem and "really" fix it. The trick, of course, > is the time.) Agreed, but sometimes workarounds are acceptable on a temporary basis, especially when the next CD is months away. > > There may be some political/logistical issues I'm not aware of > > though, like mirror sites and so forth, so the RE people will have to > > make that call. > > The rest of this email is my own personal opinion, and doesn't > necessarily reflect that of anyone else on the RE team. > > OK. One practical issue is that two of the release engineers (including > the RE team lead) are currently out of email contact. The remaining > three of us haven't discussed this issue...at this time, we have no > plans to re-release any part of 4.6. > > It's not as easy as re-running "make release". There's the very > significant issues of doing another QA cycle on a re-release, etc., not > to mention the disruption to vendors' production schedules. > > I'm not saying "no, it won't happen", but I think it's unlikely. > > Bruce. I know little or nothing about the QA process, but I assumed incorporating a vendor-supplied patch to Apache and setting a DMA variable at install time if installing from CD weren't very significant changes. I might be completely wrong of course. Re: production schedules, if you're talking about resellers who are trying to sell FreeBSD 4.6 CD sets, that's certainly understandable. (although it would be interesting to poll these vendors sometime and find out whether they'd rather wait a few days more for such bugfixes or ship known problematic stuff) However if you're referring to user site production schedules, I'm not sure it's an issue. Most significant users are plenty familiar with patching/rebuilding FreeBSD, they keep up with the news and security announcements, and I doubt large sites are using the bleeding-edge stuff as a rule anyway. (I know of one very large hosting provider - pair.com - who has virtually all their servers running something based on FreeBSD 4.1 last time I checked, and for a company with that much at stake and the work involved in upgrading all their boxes, it's easy to understand why.) However the users that *are* going to get bitten by this kind of thing are just the ones that may just throw up their hands and go back to Linux or Windows when they can't get it to install. They aren't necessarily familiar with the various FreeBSD support venues, they may be less technically competent, etc. Whereas the big sites know full well that glitches sometimes happen - they're not going anywhere and they know how to deal with the inevitable bumps in the road. Thanks for listening, Phil -- Philip J. Koenig pjklist@ekahuna.com Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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