From owner-freebsd-hackers  Mon Dec  6 13:43:39 1999
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Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 13:43:33 -0800 (PST)
From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Message-Id: <199912062143.NAA72923@apollo.backplane.com>
To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>
Cc: Dennis <dennis@etinc.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: PCI DMA lockups in 3.2 (3.3 maybe?) 
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:>     In otherwords, we should branch with the 4.1 release rather then the
:>     4.0 release.
:
:Sounds a lot like 3.x to me.  We didn't branch at 3.0 either, we
:branched one release afterwards and only after people threatened to
:mutiny if we didn't since the usual pattern up to that point had been
:to branch immmediate at the dot-zero.  It didn't seem to help, as your
:own complaints would indicate.
:
:- Jordan

    Wait until 4.2?  I don't know the answer, Jordan, but I am reasonably
    confident that an official stabiliziation period of a few months will
    help a lot.  The circumstances of the 2.2.x -> 3.0 release (the 18 
    months you quoted) were special and should never be repeated, but I
    think it is precisely the fact that 2.2.x went on for so long that wound
    up causing people to give up and start working on new stuff prior to
    3.0.  This made 3.0 especially unstable.

    So going to the 12 month schedule is a wonderful idea, but doesn't 
    quite get there in my book.  There is no significant feature freeze 
    prior to a .0 release which almost guarentees an unstable release.  
    That's ok since we tell people that .0 is never stable.  But .1 has
    to be stable and the only time we have to do it is between .0 and .1.

    If we enforce a stabilizing period between .0 and .1 and branch at .1
    rather then at .0, this combined with the 12 month schedule should result
    in pretty damn good releases.

    If we just do the 12 month schedule, I don't think it will produce as
    good a result.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@backplane.com>


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