Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 04:55:33 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 2.0.5-A: Very disheartening? Message-ID: <199506050955.EAA06438@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <28803.802330430@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jun 4, 95 10:33:50 pm
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> > This is most definitely NOT the fun project I had envisioned for this > > afternoon. :-( > > Welcome to ALPHA testing, folks! > > I do thank Joe for all his work and can only say "can I have a little > more?" in return.. Such is the lot of the software developer with an > unpaid software testing dept! :-) > > New floppies on freefall and wcarchive, please check 'em out! Cute :-) Jordan, it does seem like there's something that's not quite kosher with 2.0.5-A, and it has nothing to do with the floppies, as far as I can tell. I now have two systems that are definitely unstable - two entirely different types of systems, at that - and both have run earlier revisions of FreeBSD 2 and taken heavy poundings with relative grace for over half a year now. Now, while I do consider extracting bin to be a CPU-intensive chore, I do not consider it to be anything close to a "heavy pounding" by my previous standards. Likewise, I do not consider compiling gated to be a "heavy pounding" - yet even that trivial task killed the Pentium box a few times. UNfortunately, since it just goes belly up and resets, I do not have any great idea about what to try next. Now, since this is ALPHA testing, this could be considered acceptable. I certainly don't mind, I suffered through 2.0-ALPHA and actually *once* had an unexpected crash (quite remarkable!). HOWEVER, it appears to me that the prevailing idea behind 2.0.5 was that we felt we had a stable product to push out the door, and we were going to try to do so with a short ALPHA phase beforehand, to work out install issues and do minor bug fixes. So I am quite suprised and alarmed when I see what I interpret to be major instability within the system, which suggests to me that the initial premise - that we had something reasonably stable that was an improvement over 2.0R - is maybe NOT true. So I dutifully share some unhappy experiences on the list... and then get this sort of message back from you? Let me tell you about pissed. On a very busy weekend I blow lots of time trying to help test ALPHA, something I really do not have time to do. That is fine. I have lots of problems. That is disappointing, and I share my experiences, lest the FreeBSD core team think nobody's having any problems. I get nice little note from Jordan that maybe I just take the wrong way. Now I'm pissed because it appears to me that Jordan seems to have totally missed the boat, and also the point of accepting feedback - the bad along with the good - about ALPHA releases. If we are seeing lots of stability problems, I question whether a short ALPHA period is appropriate. Now, Jordan, I am certainly able to deal with crashes and the like. I have a 2.0R news server that occasionally locks. I have a router that sometimes reboots. I have a prototype public box that gets stale and starts randomly eating processes (2.0-041395) after about a week. We are ALPHA testing a new supposedly better-than-2.0R system. I have installed it on a pair of systems that probably approximate average user PC's pretty well (i.e. not high end equipment). A cut that is supposed to be reasonably stable to begin with - and all I have had is problems. That raises red flags in my mind. If you cannot come up with anything more constructive to say than "Welcome to ALPHA testing, folks!", you're certainly invited to not bother replying at all in the future... ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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