Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> writes:
> I *never* clean out my libraries, and haven't had any problems. I updated
> the various bits, compile them, and install them. And it all works fine.
Okay.
And this means...? :-)
> In fact, I'm beginning to get a bit annoyed at this whole push towards "the
> tarballs don't do anything except download the head; they are useless
> otherwise." If that is the frickin' case, then we should simply publish
> tarballs of the HEAD and leave it at that. We shouldn't ever bother with
> milestones or snapshot releases or anything.
I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.
The reason we want people to run HEAD is not because it's more or less
stable than any particular tarball, but because it's more useful *for
Subversion development* for people to be running HEAD. There's no
point in receiving bug reports against tarballs when HEAD develops so
fast that the reports are often obsolete by the time we get them.
(I don't see what any of this has to do with milestones, which -- as
you have often pointed out in the past -- are to help us measure
development progress. We also choose to release on them, because they
come along fairly regularly, but we don't have to do that.)
> then we should simply publish tarballs of the HEAD
Uh, and that's exactly what we do for most releases. (But if we
discover a bug in that snapshot that prevents the tarball from being
useful even for bootstrapping, then we do backports and release new
tarball, as happened recently.)
> The fact of the matter is that the downloads *ARE USEFUL*. But people have
> problems matching them up with an Apache server. (the tarballs include APR,
> APRUTIL, Neon, and Expat, so no problems there) The second problem is that
> people are ignoring the included code and using stuff on their system, which
> can easily be out of sync.
I guess I'm missing the point here.
It's not enough to say "The fact of the matter is that the downloads
are useful". What are they useful *for*? What is our goal?
I think our goal is to get people running HEAD from a working copy,
until 1.0 or thereabouts. At some point, we may want to maintain a
latest-release branch separate from the development branch, but now is
not the time. However, if people are using tarballs on a regular
basis, then supporting a release branch is exactly what we're doing,
even if "supporting" just means receiving bug reports about it.
Our purpose is to shake the bugs out of Subversion. We can best
accomplish that if people are running the latest code.
> The real answer here is to turn on the versioning in APR(UTIL) and start
> depending upon it. Also to depend more upon the versioning in httpd (see the
> ap_mmn.h file); we can have buildcheck.sh verify the values.
That will help, but it doesn't affect the main (imho) issue, which is
getting our users testing HEAD right now.
-K
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Received on Mon Apr 15 17:56:36 2002