On Jan 17, 2012, at 11:12 AM, John Kozubik wrote: > Again, I'm not suggesting more snapshots - I am suggesting more real, bona > fide releases. This will help people.
I tend to agree with you. Our release engineering process isn't serving the needs of users as much as it once did. When Walnut Creek was running release engineering, we had releases often because they wanted to make money from their subscriptions. This produced reasonably spaced minor releases and except for 4-5, decently spaced major releases. Even after the torch passed from walnut creek to others, there was still either residual pressures to make the releases happen, or inherited mindset that keep on the same pace. Today we have lost our way. We have no major vendor pushing the process along to make it happen faster. We have no reason to get things done faster or differently than the volunteers are doing it. So we're languishing. 9.0 took forever to get out, and we didn't do stop-gap 8.x releases. Our port collection has also gotten bigger since those by-gone days so doing a release of the whole ports tree is taking longer to QA, so pressure to do it more often meets up with resource constraints. Our binary update tools lag considerably compared to Linux, and there's a big reluctance to whole-heartedly embrace PBI as a possible solution. Maybe pkgng will help there. Maybe the various attempts to get ABI stability to allow for easier decoupling of FreeBSD base and FreeBSD ports releases. But we have a real problem here. One I don't have easy answers for how to solve. One that likely has many other root-causes than the few I've cherry picked for this reply. The underlying balances that allowed the early project to succeed have shifted, but we've not shifted with them. Warner _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
