Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:44:33 +0200 From: Jonathan McKeown <jonathan+freebsd-questions@hst.org.za> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Release schedules Message-ID: <200812131844.33151.jonathan%2Bfreebsd-questions@hst.org.za> In-Reply-To: <BAY126-DS7BDC6FF27AD20A16BABE0CAF90@phx.gbl> References: <200811121259.25046.jonathan%2Bfreebsd-questions@hst.org.za> <f2c294a10812120920l4d11bebfgd5c9208336b075b@mail.gmail.com> <BAY126-DS7BDC6FF27AD20A16BABE0CAF90@phx.gbl>
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On Friday 12 December 2008 19:26, Sean Cavanaugh wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > From: "Joe S" <js.lists@gmail.com> > Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 12:20 PM > To: "Roland Smith" <rsmith@xs4all.nl> > Cc: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>; "Jonathan McKeown" > <jonathan+freebsd-questions@hst.org.za> > Subject: Re: Release schedules > > > On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 4:01 AM, Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl> wrote: > >> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:59:24PM +0200, Jonathan McKeown wrote: > >>> I've been biting my tongue about this because I'm not sure that I can > >>> offer > >>> any help or useful suggestions, but here goes... > >>> > >>> What on earth is going on with release scheduling? > >> > >> Two words: volunteer project > >> > >> I would propose to do away with the release schedule altogether, or make > >> it very succinct; > >> > >> next release: when it's done. > > > > What? Isn't that the Linux kernel schedule? > > > > Give me a break. The OpenBSD team of volunteers makes a new release > > every six months, with target release dates in May and November. I > > can't recall a slip of even one day. I know, this isn't OpenBSD, but > > it proves that a regular release schedule is indeed possible. > > also remember that 6.4 was being worked on at the same time. there's only a > finite number of people to spread across both projects. finalization of 7.1 > should come faster as 6.4 has been released According to http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.1R/schedule.html , the ports tree was frozen on 8 September, tagged on 22 September and unfrozen. (I see elsewhere in this thread someone saying it's still frozen - I'm not sure which statement is correct). 7.1-RELEASE should have been done a couple of weeks later - early in October for announcement on 13 October. We are now looking at a release in January. That's not a few days or even a few weeks late - it's almost four months late; and 7.1-RELEASE will ship with a ports tree that's almost 5 months out of date. Not only that - it's shipping mere weeks before the end-of-life for 7.0-RELEASE (currently 28 Feb 2009). I have been watching the web page and freebsd-stable. There has been no obvious indication of the reason for the delays or the expected duration. (For earlier releases, there was a todo page linked from the release webpage which listed areas needing more work and areas needing testing). The -RC1 release announcement finally acknowledged that there had been a number of major problems, not all of which have been fully addressed yet. As a community, we should be ashamed of this: ``volunteer effort'' just isn't a good enough excuse - and those of us who haven't volunteered need to find out how we can help get things back on track for the next release. When I first raised this, I asked if there was anything I could do to help the release engineering team with communication. Zbigniew Szalbot made a similar offer. I really think that once 7.1 is out, we (collectively) need to have a long hard look at the release process and make sure this doesn't happen again (and again and again and again - it's not the first time that I've scheduled work around release dates and ended up being embarrassed or having to do jobs twice, with a pre-release and then again when the release arrives.) Jonathan
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