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Date:      Sat, 21 Jul 2001 13:55:10 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@freebsd.org>
To:        lamont@scriptkiddie.org
Cc:        a.l.meyers@consult-meyers.com, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: is "stable" "stable"?
Message-ID:  <20010721135510Y.jkh@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010721111339.B75328-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org>
References:  <20010721182504.L857-100000@nomad.consult-meyers.com> <20010721111339.B75328-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org>

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Very well said.  This should be added to the handbook. :)

From: Lamont Granquist <lamont@scriptkiddie.org>
Subject: Re: is "stable" "stable"?
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 11:27:01 -0700 (PDT)

> 
> On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, A. L. Meyers wrote:
> > Having followed the postings here for a few weeks it seems, at
> > least occasionally, that "stable" appears to be a bit less than
> > "stable".
> 
> You are doing a CVS checkout of a source tree that is getting updates
> on a daily basis.  If you have ever done this in a development environment
> before, you should know that absolute 100% stability in any such an
> environment is never, ever going to happen.
> 
> If you want the latest -stable sources which *are* stable, then you
> really need to checkout sources on a fresh machine, build your
> distribution and spend a few days regression testing the features of the
> OS which are important to you.  You should then roll out the build to
> your staging platform and give it at least a week or two.  Following that
> you should put it in the load balancing rotation on your production site,
> and then gradually phase it in as you gain more confidence.
> 
> Which, of course, you should be doing anyway.
> 
> If you want better stability, then checkout the actual 4.x releases with
> the security fixes.  Those have actually been frozen and then bugfixed for
> stability.  They should be better.
> 
> Why is this so difficult for people to understand?  *ANY* time you are
> checking out the head of a development branch (even one where developers
> are supposedly being "more careful") then you should expect to
> occasionally see problems.  People will break the build.  People will have
> insufficiently tested their code and subsystems will break.  I guarantee
> you that none of the FBSD developers have a sufficient testing matrix to
> *ensure* that the changes which are checked into the top of the tree will
> run on every platform out there (consider for a moment just how big the
> x86 testing matrix is).  I'm pretty damned impressed that -stable works as
> well as it does (kudos for the developers).
> 
> 
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