Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 17:54:20 +0200 (CEST) From: Andrzej Bialecki <abial@webgiro.com> To: Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk> Cc: "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@looksharp.net>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, Alok Dhir <adhir@forumone.com>, 'Richard Wackerbarth' <rkw@dataplex.net>, 'Matthew Dillon' <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, "'freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: SMP changes and breaking kld object module compatibility Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0004251739190.92416-100000@mx.webgiro.com> In-Reply-To: <39056A21.C58ED54A@originative.co.uk>
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On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Paul Richards wrote: > branch. Most commercial users are not developers, and have no interest > in anything relating to development. Professional sysadmins are > conservative creatures, they expect professional quality code to play by > the rules of the industry and those rules are widely accepted as meaning > that stable branches do no undergo ABI changes. Such changes are > reserved for major upgrades because of the consequences and risks > involved. On a similar note: I think one of serious drawbacks of FreeBSD's model for updating and bugfixing the stable branch is 'make world'. It's very inefficient and cumbersome way to do this on production machines. STABLE is stable enough for us to be able to prepare binary patches, which can be applied to a system in some (known) version. Especially security fixes, which are usually limited to specific programs. With such system present I'd be completely satisfied (as a production manager, not as a developer) if I could start with, let's say, 3.4-RELEASE, and then apply binary patches one by one to track STABLE. Instead of putting the machine out-of-service for a couple of hours, it would be 10 minutes. Also, no need to keep the sources around. Of course, implementing such a system requires careful versioning of each file in the standard system, but I think it's possible - just having the MD5 checksums around, for each consecutive patch, should do for start. Don't get me wrong - I love to see what's under the hood, analyze the sources etc. But it's not what is expected in a production environment, (IMHO of course :). Andrzej Bialecki // <abial@webgiro.com> WebGiro AB, Sweden (http://www.webgiro.com) // ------------------------------------------------------------------- // ------ FreeBSD: The Power to Serve. http://www.freebsd.org -------- // --- Small & Embedded FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ ---- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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