Date: 18 Dec 1995 01:56:08 +0100 From: tom@smart.ruhr.de (Thomas Neumann) To: Nate Williams <nate@rocky.sri.MT.net> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Impressions of stability ( was Re: FreeBSD-current-stable ??? ) Message-ID: <877mzv5gwn.fsf@smart.ruhr.de> In-Reply-To: Nate Williams's message of Sun, 17 Dec 1995 15:56:08 -0700 References: <7748.819191407@time.cdrom.com> <Pine.BSF.3.91.951217112810.440A-100000@knobel.gun.de> <199512172256.PAA21983@rocky.sri.MT.net>
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Folks, don't you think that this "discussion" is gaining a dangerous amount of emotional momentum - lets try to keep it 'professional' instead of 'personal'. Let me bring up a few words from the point of view of a mere -current user (I'm running -current for a few weeks now, but up to now have been doing so in "read-only" mode, scanning this list and trying to develop some feel for what's going on, but if it's true that <20 people really actually *run* -current, well, then my impressions might not be as unimportant as I thought them to be). Personally, I'm experiencing relatively few problems with -current. Maybe I'm just lucky and my combination of hardware components is by mere coincidence one that uses the more stable drivers or whatever - I really can't tell. I, too, have seen the whole system crash for no apparent reason, but this has happened only twice during the last four or five weeks, so I can live with that. Following the discussion, I get the impression that one half of the camp favours a more radical approach for 'making progress' while the other half is willing to lengthen development time in favour of a more stable code-base. Both points of view have their benefits, as I'm sure you're all aware, but I must admit that the "-current" :-] state of affairs is starting to get me worried from a software-engineering point of view. I'm by no means a god-of-kernel-hacking, but years of experience in large-scale application development have told me the lesson that once you allow a large software system to "drift" and destablize beyond a certain point it becomes *very* hard to get the thing back on track. Once you begin losing the grip on where to start debugging in case of problem reports and instead just feel surrounded by "a little thing not working here, a little thing not working there, and 1753 other little things not working over there..." and you don't really know *why the hell* things blow up, then, IMHO, it's time to concentrate on making things stable again instead of going for even more new features. Speaking of feeping creaturism, what actually *is* the list of new creatures scheduled for 2.2? I've never seen an official list of "this is what we're heading for" points. Having said that, I'd sure like to see a more stable -current than todays. -t
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