On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 05:29:43AM +1200, Dan Langille wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Christopher Schulte wrote:
> > At 03:45 AM 4/10/2001 +1200, Dan Langille wrote:
> > >Give meaningful and widely used names to things which people are familiar
> > >with.
> >
> > -CURRENT fits all those requirements.
>
> In this case, the familiarity is reduced to those familiar with the
> project. Witness the frequency with which the confusion
> arises.
It's question five in the FAQ.
http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/preface.html#CURRENT
The first para says "only of interest to developers working on the
system and die-hard hobbyists".
The second para says
If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not capable of
identifying the difference between a real problem and a temporary
problem, you should not use FreeBSD-CURRENT. This branch sometimes
evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable for a number of days at a
time. People that use FreeBSD-CURRENT are expected to be able to analyze
any problems and only report them if they are deemed to be mistakes
rather than ``glitches''. Questions such as ``make world produces some
error about groups'' on the -CURRENT mailing list are sometimes treated
with contempt.
I don't see any way in which someone could start running -current
without seeing that warning, or the equivalent warnings in the Handbook.
Short of making -current refuse to build without a magic cookie in
/etc/make.conf, and a webpage that contains that cookie along with this
dire warning, I don't see how we can make it more obvious to people that
they shouldn't be running -current if they don't know what they're doing.
N
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