Date: Thu, 20 Apr 95 18:53:11 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: gene@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Minutes of the Thursday, April 13th core team meeting in Berkeley. Message-ID: <9504210053.AA00919@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <12952.798418578@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Apr 20, 95 03:56:18 pm
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[ ... seperate technical considerations from release considerations ... ] > It's a perfectly reasonable idea, but it involves a fair bit of > discipline on the part of the release engineer, and up to now the > release-rolling process has been arcane enough that not many > (including us) could even figure it out well enough to generate a > release. Such a seperation has the inherent problem that there is never a culmination of efforts; engineering types are free to commit at any time, and a release is only a snapshot. Give two or more major systems being worked on simultaneously, and the result is a snapshot that never works. The release engineer can, with a large amount of effort, then track the developement effort to pound this into something that can boot and install, etc. I would say that this is an unacceptable expectation for a volunteer effort, unless the release engineer is a paid employee so that there is a reason that they would put up with this crap. The other model where this would work is the 800 pound gorilla model wher the release engineer can dictate schedules. Not only is this an intuitively (for me anyway) flawed model for a developement effort, we have the shining example of 386BSD 0.2 to prove that it's not a viable model. It's a reasonable idea, but it lacks someone willing and able to "bell the cat". I'll agree that the arcane process has to go... making a release has got to be largely automatic to free up the release engineer's time to pursue bugfix inetgration, etc. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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