Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 11:27:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Lamont Granquist <lamont@scriptkiddie.org> To: "A. L. Meyers" <a.l.meyers@consult-meyers.com> Cc: <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: is "stable" "stable"? Message-ID: <20010721111339.B75328-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org> In-Reply-To: <20010721182504.L857-100000@nomad.consult-meyers.com>
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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). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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