Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 21:00:34 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Doug Barton <DougB@FreeBSD.ORG>, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 4.x compatibilty.. Was: MFC of rcNG? Message-ID: <p05111788b93579ec8312@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <3D0FB17F.6F8B5819@FreeBSD.org> References: <20681.1024423602@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za> <3D0F7AAA.110E0D8@FreeBSD.org> <20020618224029.I52976@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> <3D0FB17F.6F8B5819@FreeBSD.org>
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At 3:17 PM -0700 6/18/02, Doug Barton wrote: > Yeah, sorry... I was thinking about it from a different >perspective. My point is that for most of our users, whose only >contact with the rc* stuff that exists currently is twiddling >rc.conf*, the change will be transparent. For those "medium to >high" power/enterprise/commercial users who actually care about >such things, there will be a learning curve. But (and I may be >biased here) I think it's all curving in the right direction. Providing for a smooth transition for some new change does not in any way imply that the change is a bad direction. I think the rcNew stuff is great to see. For the users who *do* care about /etc/rc-stuff, please realize that they are going to face whatever headaches that we developers avoid. It's not like they are all running one single machine which will be running 4.x one day, and 5.x the next. They're going to have multiple machines, and any responsible organization is going to run 5.0 on a few machines for awhile, instead of cutting the entire organization over in one fell swoop. Some of them won't REALLY switch over their organization to 5.x until 5.1-release or even later. They WILL have to deal with both rc-setups on a day-to-day basis for months. It is obviously more work to get rcNew into stable, or support rcOld in -current, but I do think that one or the other of those things should happen. I would think that it would be nicer to get rcNew into stable -- even though that implies more work, because it *should* be true that rcOld in the 4.x-stable branch will be seeing fewer changes as our (developer) attention moves more and more to 5.x-current. I also assume that anyone who has to deal with both branches will soon feel that they would rather have rcNew in both, and not rcOld in both. I also think that we don't really have all that many people testing things on current. We claim to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of FreeBSD users. I doubt we have more than 50-100 users who are *actively* tracking -current. There are a lot of odd cases which can come up in that other 99.9% of our users. Please note that none of this is meant as a comment specific to rcNew per se. I'm just of the opinion that any user-visible improvement that we *can* move into stable, without disrupting stable, is probably a good thing. I do appreciate all the work it's taken to get rcNew this far. But I also think we should be slow to say "There are so many completely incompatible changes in 5.0 anyway, what's one more?". For some change which can be MFC'ed (without disruption), I think that both developers and the end-users are better off if the change is at least available for testing by users in stable. Now, that could very well be a reasonable thing to say for rcNew, but I'd just be slow to say it... :-) -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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