From owner-freebsd-current  Fri Apr 30 16:52:59 1999
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Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 16:52:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Message-Id: <199904302352.QAA41119@apollo.backplane.com>
To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: -stable vs -current (was Re: solid NFS patch #6... )
References:  <199904302208.RAA07422@home.dragondata.com>
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    Well, what it comes down to is the number of developers actively
    developing the codebase.  We had some truely unfortunate timing with
    people leaving and new people coming on, and pieces of the system ( such
    as NFS ) that simply were left dangling for a long period of time with
    nobody actively locating or fixing bugs.  There have been too many critics
    and not enough people getting into the guts of the code and fixing things.
    ( Of course, I'm *very* biased here in my opinion :-) ).

    What it comes down to is that a whole lot of changes were made between
    2.2.x and 3.0 without enough debugging by the authors.  This kinda resulted
    in a partially rotting code base even through the 3.1 release, until a
    number of us got sick and tired of it and started actively tracking down
    and fixing the bugs.

    I expect the 3.2 release to be a really good release.

    It is true that -current has been, more often then not, more stable then
    -stable in the last two months.  This is because fixes were being made
    to -current more quickly then they could be backported to -stable.  Most
    of these fixes *have* been backported at this point.  There are still a 
    few that have not that are on my hot list ( and still not addressed, even
    with prodding ).  There are also a few bug fixes that simply cannot be 
    backported to stable without some pain ( i.e. require the complete
    replacement of a number of subsystems ), and pain is not in the cards 
    with the 3.2 release so close.

    It is hard enough dealing with two branches of the source tree.  I will
    personally take my Super Soaker 5000 to anyone suggesting that we have
    *three* !!!!.  Sqirt sqirt sqirt!

    I am hoping that we will be able to accomplish a major synchronization
    after the 3.2 release.  I personally believe that -current is stable 
    enough that we should do one big-assed commit to sync -stable up to the
    current -current and then continue as per normal.  I only wish EGCS 
    hadn't been incorporated quite yet.  At the very least, I want to 
    sync *my* stuff up ( NFS/VM/VFS/BIO/VN/SWAPPER ). 

						-Matt



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