kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@acm.org> writes:
>
>>More info on FreeBSD release engineering can be found at:
>>
>>http://www.freebsd.org/releng/
>>
>>Hope this is helpful.
>
>
> IMHO it was -- thanks for posting.
>
> I think the big lesson we should draw here is that once a tarball has
> become publicly visible in any way at all -- by appearing in a
> downloads area, whatever -- we must consider it released. We don't
> have a choice about this. People will download it, people will base
> third-party releases on it, people will submit to Freshmeat, etc. It
> is *not* within our power to say "No, that wasn't a real release." We
> can shout it to the wind all we want, but it won't change the way
> people treat the tarball.
It depends on where you put the tarball for testing. It definitely
doesn't belong in subversion.tigris.org/tarballs/ during testing.
If you put it in a place like: /testing/tarballs/ or something like
that, the status of the tarball is a lot clearer.
> Therefore, I think it would be best to do the pre-release testing and
> signing processes privately, among the full committers, and *then* put
> the thing out where others can see it. If a problem is discovered
> after that, well, then we chuck that release number and make a new
> release with the next available number.
Heck no. We get into the smoke-filled-backroom-where-the-old-boys-decide
what-is-a-release territory. Or at least the perception. Please keep it
open.
Also consider that when only allowing full-committers@ to participate,
and thus to test, you are eliminating a useful group for feedback.
People who have access to platforms we don't have access to, or maybe
access to the same platform and actually have cycles to burn to do a
testrun. Better to have dev@ figure out a release is a dud than to have
the rest of the world come to that conclusion.
> This wold lose us a little bit in the "Do Everything Openly"
> department, but not in a major way, and I don't see any other way to
> do it. We want the release to be tested & signed; in order to do
> that, we have to test & sign it before we "release" it. We've learned
> that this verb "release" has a meaning we don't entirely control, so
> we have to be careful about what we make available and when.
I think we just have to deal with the fact that with doing things in
the open we loose some control over when things are brought into the
spotlight.
Sander
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Received on Mon Apr 4 20:33:00 2005