freebsd stable - Apr 2003 - Still on the release process

Hi,

One thing that has not been taken into consideration in discussions on
this topic afair is all the people who use FreeBSD, but don't subscribe
to any of the lists.

I'm sure there's a number of people out there that have already
downloaded
the 4.8 iso-images, simply because they were there. What that means is
that the world will have two sets of cds flying about, ones that are
official and ones that are not.

This can also happen after the release, if for example a mirror breaks in
some way and stops mirroring FreeBSD contents. What they'll have in store
is an old version of iso-images which are broken. Of course one could
argue that you should always check the checksums or signatures, but that
doesn't really help the people who don't read the lists (the checksums
on
their broken mirror may be quite correct for the broken images). And a lot
of people don't check them anyway.

Of course the same can happen with people using cvsup, although they are
more likely to read the mailing lists.

IMHO there are two solutions to this problem: either don't make mistakes
or change the release process. Mistakes always happen and you shouldn't
start blaming anyone for them, especially when talking about the best
operating system out there which you also happen to get for free.

As other people have also been discussing, my proposal would be to make it
so that the last RC will become the RELEASE and the RELEASE tags never
slide. If there was a bug in the release, the release process would be
stopped and x.x.1 would be tagged instead. I see no harm in releasing
x.x.1 instead if it means a better release.

This would perhaps mean that releases will take longer to come out, but
it would also mean that they would be better and the confusion which has
happened now would never happen again.

I hope re@ will consider everything that has been discussed. :)

Thanks,

	-jake

ps. sorry for starting a new thread, I was a bit too hasty in deleting
read emails before feeling the irresistable urge to post this message. :)

-- 
Jarkko Santala <jake@iki.fi>            http://www.iki.fi/~jake/
System Administrator                    2001:670:83:f08::/64

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 07:35:37AM +0300, Jarkko Santala
wrote:
> One thing that has not been taken into consideration in discussions on
> this topic afair is all the people who use FreeBSD, but don't subscribe
> to any of the lists.
Those people mostly buy their CDROMs from a vendor.
> I'm sure there's a number of people out there that have already
downloaded
> the 4.8 iso-images, simply because they were there. What that means is
> that the world will have two sets of cds flying about, ones that are
> official and ones that are not.
"flying about" implies that they will be distributed further which I
think is quite erroneous.  A few people may have downloaded the wrong
ISO images, but thats the end of it.  Those few people may never
realize they have the wrong ISO since the changes are so minor.  The
mirror operators and vendors are distributing the correct ISOs.
> IMHO there are two solutions to this problem: either don't make
mistakes
A third is to stop distributing ISO images altogether.
> or change the release process. Mistakes always happen and you shouldn't
Changing the FTP distribution process I think makes a lot more sense
if we were to go this route.  There's a huge delay between when
something goes onto ftp-master and it is announced, during which time
minor problems are sometimes found (I sure wish more people would find
these during the RC phase!).

Still, thank you for the mail many of this has been discussed before
and will be further considered as we seek to make improvements to the
process.

      - Murray
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This link should help:
http://www.freebsdmirrors.org/FBSDsites.php3?release=4.8-RELEASE
~Ken


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Murray Stokely" <murray@freebsdmall.com>
To: "Jarkko Santala" <jake@iki.fi>
Cc: <stable@freebsd.org>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 12:37 AM
Subject: Re: Still on the release process