Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 07:35:37 +0300 (EEST) From: Jarkko Santala <jake@iki.fi> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Still on the release process Message-ID: <20030404070740.X474@trillian.santala.org>
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Hi, One thing that has not been taken into consideration in discussions on this topic afair is all the people who use FreeBSD, but don't subscribe to any of the lists. I'm sure there's a number of people out there that have already downloaded the 4.8 iso-images, simply because they were there. What that means is that the world will have two sets of cds flying about, ones that are official and ones that are not. This can also happen after the release, if for example a mirror breaks in some way and stops mirroring FreeBSD contents. What they'll have in store is an old version of iso-images which are broken. Of course one could argue that you should always check the checksums or signatures, but that doesn't really help the people who don't read the lists (the checksums on their broken mirror may be quite correct for the broken images). And a lot of people don't check them anyway. Of course the same can happen with people using cvsup, although they are more likely to read the mailing lists. IMHO there are two solutions to this problem: either don't make mistakes or change the release process. Mistakes always happen and you shouldn't start blaming anyone for them, especially when talking about the best operating system out there which you also happen to get for free. As other people have also been discussing, my proposal would be to make it so that the last RC will become the RELEASE and the RELEASE tags never slide. If there was a bug in the release, the release process would be stopped and x.x.1 would be tagged instead. I see no harm in releasing x.x.1 instead if it means a better release. This would perhaps mean that releases will take longer to come out, but it would also mean that they would be better and the confusion which has happened now would never happen again. I hope re@ will consider everything that has been discussed. :) Thanks, -jake ps. sorry for starting a new thread, I was a bit too hasty in deleting read emails before feeling the irresistable urge to post this message. :) -- Jarkko Santala <jake@iki.fi> http://www.iki.fi/~jake/ System Administrator 2001:670:83:f08::/64
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