Very well said. This should be added to the handbook. :)
From: Lamont Granquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: is "stable" "stable"?
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 11:27:01 -0700 (PDT)
>
> On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, A. L. Meyers wrote:
> > Having followed the postings here for a few weeks it seems, at
> > least occasionally, that "stable" appears to be a bit less than
> > "stable".
>
> You are doing a CVS checkout of a source tree that is getting updates
> on a daily basis. If you have ever done this in a development environment
> before, you should know that absolute 100% stability in any such an
> environment is never, ever going to happen.
>
> If you want the latest -stable sources which *are* stable, then you
> really need to checkout sources on a fresh machine, build your
> distribution and spend a few days regression testing the features of the
> OS which are important to you. You should then roll out the build to
> your staging platform and give it at least a week or two. Following that
> you should put it in the load balancing rotation on your production site,
> and then gradually phase it in as you gain more confidence.
>
> Which, of course, you should be doing anyway.
>
> If you want better stability, then checkout the actual 4.x releases with
> the security fixes. Those have actually been frozen and then bugfixed for
> stability. They should be better.
>
> Why is this so difficult for people to understand? *ANY* time you are
> checking out the head of a development branch (even one where developers
> are supposedly being "more careful") then you should expect to
> occasionally see problems. People will break the build. People will have
> insufficiently tested their code and subsystems will break. I guarantee
> you that none of the FBSD developers have a sufficient testing matrix to
> *ensure* that the changes which are checked into the top of the tree will
> run on every platform out there (consider for a moment just how big the
> x86 testing matrix is). I'm pretty damned impressed that -stable works as
> well as it does (kudos for the developers).
>
>
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