Date: Tue, 5 Aug 1997 00:47:56 -0700 (PDT) From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com Cc: helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De, andreas@klemm.gtn.com, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Current is currently really a mess (was: Re: Tk/Tcl broken(?)) Message-ID: <199708050747.AAA15842@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: <4492.870649823@time.cdrom.com> (jkh@time.cdrom.com)
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* major release # and the old -current becoemes -stable), I don't see * how this is such a tremendous hardship - there will be ample time to * sort the issues out. It is, trust me. You just never had to do it. When I dropped 3.0-current support for awhile for 2.2 release (it was supposed to be only a couple of weeks, but turned out to be four months), it took me an incredible amount of work to get everything back up again. And we only had about 700 ports back then. One thing to note is that I'm not supervising a group of people hired to do ports work from 9 to 5. It's not like I can yell "Ok guys! No more -stable work! Go convert your machines to -current! Now fix the bugs!". The porters have their machines to work on, and they are either -stable or -current (and it seems we have a pretty good balance now). So it's actually EASIER to work on both branches, and to make sure things don't get entirely out of track wrt -current. * And to those who would argue that not having ports for the duration of * -current's run is such a terrible thing, I might respectfully suggest * that you have your priorities exactly reversed, and not because "users * are more important than developers" (as Garrett accused me of * believing in a private email) but rather because of the user ratios we * have. Most people run the release branches and most people are Nobody said we need to support -current developers because they are more valuable than users. The fact is that many ports developers run -current for one reason or another, and there is no reason for me to not take their patches and modifications as long as the ports still work for -stable. And as Andreas and Steve P. (among others) pointed out, it is simply just a matter of effictive use of their time. I'd rather see fsmp commit in /sys than trying to fix up his tcl build by hand. * Satoshi has been petititioned more times than I can count to support * the 2.2.x folks and he's answered each time that trying to maintain an * active ports tree for *two* branches is just too much work. Now given Excuse me, but I have been supporting the 2.2.x folks from the very beginning, and will continue to do so. I learned the lesson in the 2.1.x fiasco. We should never have planned to release a new version without updating ports and packages. (We realized that when 2.1.5 went out, but by then it was too late to resync....) * that, who does it make more sense to keep ports "active" for - the * -current users or the -stable users? Given the comparative rates of * change in each branch, which makes the most *sense* to support? Given Nobody is saying "I want ports-current!!! Drop ports-stable!!!". This argument is totally moot. * I'm not so pessimistic as this, given the long release cycles we have. * Once -current actually shows signs of becoming a released product, and * I don't see that happening anywhere before the end of the year, people * can take whatever was active in the RELENG_2_2 branch and retrofit it * into -current. With the same argument about -current moving faster and faster, it's going to be harder and harder to catch the longer we let it run ahead of us. Satoshi
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