Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 09:06:27 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Robert Withrow <witr@rwwa.com> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Sergey <serge69@nym.alias.net>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [Q] How stable is FreeBSD 3.X ? Message-ID: <199905251606.JAA03532@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 25 May 1999 09:00:53 EDT." <199905251300.JAA06131@spooky.rwwa.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > mike@smith.net.au said: > :- We depend on our users to tell us about problems on the -stable branch > :- before it's rolled into a release, not afterwards. If you're not > :- willing to take part in this process, your complaints are likely to > :- be ignored at the very least. > > Do I read this correctly as a policy statement that problem reports > for -RELEASE are discouraged and ignored? Seems like a good way > to ensure the non-fixing of bugs. Problem reports for -RELEASE versions are treated just like any other problem report. If they are timely, contain relevant information, and can be either reproduced or understood, they'll be acted upon. If, however, the "problem report" is just a complaint about how hopeless we are for letting a bug slip into a -RELEASE version, or if it's a complaint about code that is many months old, the report will be ignored, yes. What else could we do about it? > An equally good way to ensure the non-fixing of bugs is to demand, > for every bug report, that the reporter upgrade to some other version > of the OS, or suffer the problem report being ignored and discarded. > And this seems to be the common practice. The alternative is unworkable. We have a massive development and support load, and very limited resources to apply to it. If we attempted to support every release we've ever put out, we'd never get any development done. It's also quite likely that a bug that someone has encountered in old code has _already_been_fixed_. There are to ways to determine this: - Diagnose the problem; potentially taking hours or days of developer time, depending on how supportive and clueful the plaintiff is. - Have the plaintiff upgrade to the most recent revision on their branch. One of these methods imposes a very high developer cost, the other none at all. Both require about the same amount of effort on the plaintiff's part. Guess which one is more efficient? > It is probably just my naivety (I've only been doing this for 30 years) > but it seems to me a better approach would be to welcome and encourage > bug reports against -RELEASE. And, should it be the case that the problem > is fixed in -STABLE or -CURRENT, cheerfully inform the reporter of that > fact, leaving it up to the reporter to decide if upgrading makes sense. > Assuming that fixing the bugs is the goal. We do welcome and encourage detailed and informative problem reports. We do not encourage content-free complaints of any sort. Has the distinction sunk in yet? -- \\ The mind's the standard \\ Mike Smith \\ of the man. \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ -- Joseph Merrick \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199905251606.JAA03532>