From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Jun 25 14:23:52 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from smtp.easystreet.com (easystreet.com [206.26.36.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E654137B405 for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:23:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jwatkins@firstplan.com) Received: from nightstalker ([206.129.94.230]) by smtp.easystreet.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with SMTP id f5PLNjL08286; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:23:49 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jason Watkins" To: "Jordan Hubbard" Cc: "Stable" Subject: RE: Staying *really stable* in FreeBSD Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:23:43 -0700 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 In-Reply-To: <20010624023403R.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Importance: Normal 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 I think it's become clear in this discussion that some people reguard -stable as the secure, regularly updated moving release canidate. Other people view -stable as a just stable enough branch for developers to coordinate building new functionality. If the 2nd view is the official one, then a new branch should be started that has the first purpose in mind. Weither you like it or not, a great many users are simply going to insist that they have some way of updating the system at a days notice of security or stability issues imbetween releases. In my own expierences working in the software world (CRM, not anything systems related) releasing new functionality often in small doses, basicly as often as your clients IT staff can stomach dealing with, absolutely obliterates any other approach. Changes in idiology, functionality or configuration are small, delt with quickly, and the feedback loop between request/response and actual implimentation shorts to mere weeks. Everyone ends up much happyer. I was under the understanding, gleaned from the handbook and from some people here, that -stable was the place for this sort of mentality. If it's not, then IMHO, we need a place for it. As anicdotal evidence, I used debian quite a bit a few years back. There certainly was no problem staying with the stable branch there. The OpenBSD team also seems to show it's possible to maintain a stable moving codebase as well. Is it actually any individuals role to oversee the stability of stable? Or is it left to each individual committer who's checked out certain tasks to judge if his code is safe enough to move from -current to -stable? Whole holds the vision of common practices and evangalises them to the rest of the developers? Who ensures (by review) that a mistake of practice only happens once? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message