I think I have finally decoded Jo Rhett's issue. It is very hard to decipher because the poster refuses to exactly identify their problem. The entire problem comes down to the definition of -RELEASE. Jo apparantly feels that they can ONLY run -RELEASE branded code at their workplace. That means that they cannot run any form of -STABLE. Therefore, they can only ever run 6.3-RELEASE and then only if no bugs were fixed after the official branding of 6.3-RELEASE. I cannot speak at all about the branding of 6.3-RELEASE. I run 7.0-STABLE here. What Jo seems to thik is that a certain sequence of events occurred during the 6.3-RELEASE branding. 6.3-RELEASE was marked in the tree. Sometime after this marking event occurred, bugs were ientified and subsequently fixed in the -STABLE branch. These bugs have been identified by Jo as SHOWSTOPPER bugs which will prevent him from ever using 6.3-RELEASE, since by their definition, they can only ever use the exact thing identified by the cvs tag of 6.3-RELEASE. Therefore, by Jo's definition, they can never run 6.3-anything at their shop and are forced to wait for 6.4-RELEASE, whenever that happens. Therefore, they must take on the onerous duty of examining all security fixes target for 6.3 and redo them for 6.2. Basically, they do not wish to do this and protest the EoL status given to 6.2 because they are physically prevented from using 6.3. They refuse to even try to identify whether or not 6.3-RELEASE actually has any bugs that affect them, they just assume that the presence of bugs fixed AFTER the tagging of 6.3-RELEASE in cvs certifies their inability to use the actual 6.3-RELEASE code, since they can apparantly only run binary releases direct from FreeBSD and cannot "roll their own" for some unknown reason. They are also, apparantly, prohibited from testing any code locally due to some unknowable reason. Can anyone verify that some number of bugs related to either a) gmirror, b) bge and/or c)twe were fixed after the release of 6.3? That is as far as I can tell the reason that Jo objets to EoL of 6.2, the fact that 6.3 is unusable due to these late-fixed bugs. /Joe
Joe Kelsey wrote:> The entire problem comes down to the definition of -RELEASE. Jo > apparantly feels that they can ONLY run -RELEASE branded code at their > workplace. That means that they cannot run any form of -STABLE.Interesting, and unfortunate. Empirically, I always felt that the -STABLE branch shortly after each -RELEASE is the most stable. I suspect the reason is large numbers of people install or upgrade to a -RELEASE, discover and report a number of bugs which subsequently get fixed.
On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Joe Kelsey <joe@zircon.seattle.wa.us> wrote:> Can anyone verify that some number of bugs related to either a) gmirror, b) > bge and/or c)twe were fixed after the release of 6.3? That is as far as I > can tell the reason that Jo objets to EoL of 6.2, the fact that 6.3 is > unusable due to these late-fixed bugs.I can't speak for gmirror. But I suspect the bigger problem with bge and 3ware is that the drivers attempt to provide coverage for many many variants of hardware. The bge driver covers (at last count) 59 different chips and variants. New variants keep on arriving, with new bugs and new fixes, so our driver requires updates for these *new* chips. There's the catch. The same driver in 6.2 would require the same updates. If Joe's hardware worked with 6.2, it would work with 6.3 as well. The situation is similar with 3ware. There are even two different drivers. twe and twa. twe supports two different hardware interfaces. twa has 4 different hardware interfaces. twa has been getting frequent updates to handle new variations of the 9000 series cards. Again, it seems likely that Joe's hardware would run fine with 6.3-R if it already works with 6.2-R. So far we don't even know which of the 59 variants of bge hardware Jo wants to run with, nor which 3ware driver.. let alone the 3ware variants. I don't recall him mentioning whether it is twe or twa. -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell