Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 15:33:21 -0800 (PST) From: Gordon Tetlow <gordont@bluemtn.net> To: Patrick Bihan-Faou <patrick@netzuno.com> Cc: <cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: proposals for fixing the PROBLEM at hand Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.33.0103231516340.76454-100000@sdmail0.sd.bmarts.com> In-Reply-To: <HJEEKLMFLKEOKHOKNPBMAEPICLAA.patrick@netzuno.com>
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On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Patrick Bihan-Faou wrote: > Humm... By reading this I have the very strong feeling that what you are > advocating for is RELENG_3. As far as I know, since RELENG_4 is the official > "STABLE" branch, RELENG_3 has gone in maintenance mode and apart for the few > required security fixes has not changed much if at all in the last 6 months. Um, no. What's going to happen (pipe up if I'm wrong here) is that when we make the cut for 4.3-RELEASE, it's not going to be just a cvs tag, but branch in of itself. AFAIK, RELENG_2_2 is dead, RELENG_3 has one foot in the grave. The reason is, no one generally runs them (although I have some 2.2.8 boxen kicking around), thus no one to maintain them. > I think that you are really asking for something that is not really > practical: do you want to do this sort of maintenance on all the tagged > release ? Right now that would mean 6 different flavors of RELENG_4 (4.0, > 4.1, 4.1.1, 4.2, 4.3 and "stable" to maintain. This will quickly become a > total nightmare. If your answer to this is we only "maintain" the last > release, then I don't feel you provide any more benefits than the current > situation, because with a release cycle of about 6 months, the so called > "maintenance" version would still be a moving target with fairly significant > feature/behavior changes every 6 months. I don't think that it would be that hard to provide support for all the releases. The code isn't *that* divergent (I hope). Yes, there are a few major changes that might be backported to RELENG_4, but that should be the exception, not the rule. My view on when the RELEASE branches should be updated is when there is a security advisory on something in the core os. That isn't exactly that often. Most security advisories these days are for ports. > I think that the overall philosophy is more or less: > If I use "current", I expect to update my machine at least once a week. I > definitely read the cvs-all and the current mailing lists. And file the > occasional PR with the fixes I find necessary. Probably more than once a week. And hopefully more than the occasional PR. > If I use "stable", I update my machines every 1 - 1.5 months. This means > that I have something that is evolving, but in quantifiable amounts at every > update. And I actively read cvs-all to figure out when I want to do these > upgrades. *sigh* if only everyone read cvs-all. Of course, having a cvs-stable would be nice. Maybe I'll look at the logging script in the CVSROOT. Course, I don't know perl, but why should that stop me? > If I want a system that I can forget about (and I have a few of these), I > install RELENG_3, and only when security related updates are announced do I > upgrade them. The tradeoff that I am taking is exactly what you would find > acceptable: the performance may not be the best (ATA, Softupdates, etc. not > available), the features may be somewhat more limited (netgraph, nat, ipfw, > etc.) but I know the quirks and I am only interested in security related > fixes (named, ...). That's what these release branches are going to provide. At least, that's what I hope they provide. -gordon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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