Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 21:25:43 -0800 From: Royce Williams <royce.williams@gmail.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ? Message-ID: <CA%2BE3k93Kkdozi5SA3RCsfe0cmZJCcFUzZxJqDs%2BH2qLr_Dpbgg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CAJ-VmonEi411MPd9cXJAdJkYRsFLqfNyc5DJe7zkGxsLXBiSxw@mail.gmail.com> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1206111537310.19012@kozubik.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1206121545560.19012@kozubik.com> <CAJ-Vmomw7Tnce2Gyo443smS_%2BZQ4jLhWUqxhuZ2m-F%2Bxi81=Nw@mail.gmail.com> <201206130853.32687.jhb@freebsd.org> <CAGH67wTJ7zwAtf0g009_bxyJP5VXBUkeebNGvZCm%2B-0-8RfjvA@mail.gmail.com> <20120614042602.GA6638@lonesome.com> <CAJ-VmonEi411MPd9cXJAdJkYRsFLqfNyc5DJe7zkGxsLXBiSxw@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 8:30 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> wrote: > On 13 June 2012 21:26, Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 08:50:24AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote: >>> The only way that this would really work is if there were dedicated >>> sustaining engineers working on actively backporting code, testing it, >>> committing it, etc. >> >> I'm going to agree with Garrett here. =A0IMHO we've reached (or surpasse= d) >> the limit of what is reasonable to ask volunteers to commit their spare >> time to. =A0This is doubly true when we have more than one "stable" bran= ch. > > I totally concur. Ah, but you can get the same effect by freeing up those engineers to work on the hard stuff. This is my usual soapbox (see [1], [2]): Push more of the mundane work out to the edges, so that the developers can focus more on the core (like more releases/features/testing/projects). Here are some ideas. Only developers can implement them, but they would start paying for themselves immediately ... in developer time. - Frequent snapshots, with tools to automatically apply them and roll them back (freebsd-update + ZFS snapshots?). - Tools to do binary walks of snapshots to pinpoint when a bug appeared. (Think 'git bisect' + freebsd-update.) - A taggable FAQ that supports faceted search, and a quick way to add entries (or propose them for approval). - A way to search for known fixes to transient bugs and hardware issues [1]= . - General debugging and testing tools for non-developers, including tools for filing smarter bug reports. - A way to automatically upload crash dumps for bulk analysis (like Windows does). - A dmesg analyzer that downloads a list during install, and looks for known issues (or workarounds) with your hardware for that version of FreeBSD (or recommend a different version!). Tools like these would also help more people achieve the "I tried it, and it Just Worked" moment. This can keep people's interest long enough to give FreeBSD a serious try. Some of them might enter the volunteer pool. I'm not a developer, but if some of the above could be tackled, they might free up enough Developer Equivalents (DEs, a term which I have just made up) to be more than worth the effort. Royce [1]. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-doc/2011-September/018865.h= tml [2]. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037310= .html
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