Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 12:37:58 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> Cc: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PCI DMA lockups in 3.2 (3.3 maybe?) Message-ID: <945.944512678@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 06 Dec 1999 12:19:20 PST." <199912062019.MAA72301@apollo.backplane.com>
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> I think the solution here is to change the release mechanism slightly. > I believe we made a huge mistake splitting of the 4.x tree from 3.x > so early. I was going to make a point about this, but thank you for making it for me. :-) My point was going to be that it was clearly not possible to please even a large fraction of the FreeBSD user base with respect to scheduling and Matt's statement above only underscores that in flashing neon. Those who were actually around at the time will remember that the -current branch had already gone "dot zero" with 3.0 and still we refused to branch 3.x-stable, despite great public pressure to do so. More months went by and finally the -current branch was running on 18 months with no branch, many feeling compelled to comment that we were supposed to "roll over" every 12 months and that this extra 6 month delay was unconscionable. Many arguments about how we were holding up progress and that volunteers were going to start wandering off to other *BSD projects were raised, along with more dire predictions, and finally enough was enough and we set a date by which all the late committers should get their stuff in so that we could finally branch the sucker. We did so and there was much rejoicing, at least up until now when various folks felt compelled to creatively reinterpret history and turn an "unconscionable delay" into a "precipitous rush to branch." I tell you, it's just not possible to win, especially when those doing the most yelling are always conspicuously absent when crunch time comes. Matt wasn't really fully on board at the time and I'm not pointing my finger at him specifically, but it seems like everyone's hindsight is 20-20 whereas their immediate vision concerning what needs to be fixed in a timely fashion often comes closer to the legal definition of blindness. If you want to make this or any other branch a decent release target, the time to start is not 10 days before it enters a feature freeze, the time to start is right after it branches! It's my hope that people will take this lesson more to heart when 4.0's own time to branch comes up. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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