Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 15:54:32 -0400 From: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> Cc: <stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Releases Message-ID: <014a01c0c12e$e5e76f20$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> References: <Pine.BSF.4.32.0104100522430.38514-100000@xeon.int.nz.freebsd.org>
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It's a good thing that I put my flame-retardant suit on this morning before I checked my e-mail. I hadn't expected this much debate about the naming. The basis consensus of the group has been that -CURRENT and -STABLE are well-established, mean the appropriate things to the appropriate people, and are self-documenting enough for those who need to know, but also that there exists a requirement for documentation to be improved in certain areas. In the case of people running -CURRENT on a production machine, that's just a plain and simple mistake. Ever wonder how someone who barely knows how to use cvsup and make world manages to obtain -CURRENT in the first place? Most of the time these people have only used cvsup to sync the ports tree - which uses "tag=.". They figure that getting the most recent source code would be the same, and do so. Unfortunately, they end up with -CURRENT instead of the latest -RELEASE. Here the problem isn't with cvsup, but rather a lack of knowledge about CVS and the concept of tags. RTFM is the solution (section 18 and appendix A in particular.) This said, I retract my suggestion that -DEV replace -CURRENT, since it wouldn't make a difference. Next, the case of -STABLE/-BETA/-RC/-RELEASE. I still maintain that -BETA is confusing to the newbie (since due to M$, betas of IE were more like pre-alphas and totally trashed most systems and rightly freak out most novice admins), while STABLE/RC/RELEASE just makes sense. However, this isn't in the handbook and should be, so that people on the list can say "go to handbook/release-process.html" and people unfamiliar with our release process will become enlightened. Next, the case of the bind and ntpd updates. Yes, these were fixed in -STABLE and -CURRENT very quickly, but were only documented in UPDATING. How many people who are running -RELEASE have this? That's right, none. If the "current release" box had an "Newsflash" or other such link to inform users of 1) critical bugs that exist in the current release, and 2) HOWTOs that show how to fix them, then a lot of the confusion surrounding these fixes would be resolved. Finally, almost every newbie I see asking a question asks "how can I do this on FreeBSD, and where is the HOWTO- to help me?" Most often these people are redirected to offsite repositories of information, rather than the documentation included with FreeBSD. IMHO, this contributes to the degradation of the existing documentation of FreeBSD, as more effort will go into updating third-party sources. The summary? If we can accurately answer newbie's questions with solid documentation (rather than everyone's pet solution in the lists), then we are "teaching a newbie to read", and will hopefully have to service fewer requests from that newbie in the future. -- Matt Emmerton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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