Fallout from the CVS discussion

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2012, Konstantin Belousov wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 04:37:49PM -0400, Eitan Adler wrote:
>
> Removing the whole CVS discussion above, want to answer to seemingly 
> unrelated note in your email, which I see as continuing very disturbing 
> trend.
>
>> However, -CURRENT is not meant to be a production system.
>
> It is simply not true. CURRENT shall never be knowingly put into a state 
> where it cannot be used for the 'production-grade' use, whatever it means. 
> We do accept changes are so disruptive that some unknown fallout is 
> expected, since otherwise developers cannot make any significant progress.
>
> But introducing known breakage is simply not acceptable. Doing so shrinks 
> the already limited testing base we have for HEAD.

I'd argue that one of the greatest improvements in FreeBSD development in the 
early 2000s was the shifting of high-risk work-in-progress development from 
the CVS head to Perforce.  This allowed the head to remain remarkably stable 
during the multi-year SMPng, KSE, TrustedBSD, GEOM, etc, projects that would 
otherwise have been remarkably disruptive.  This trend has continued with 
increased use of Subversion branches, Git/Mercurial repositories, etc.

Many companies develop their products alongside -CURRENT branches because they 
need a long in-field product lifespan only accomplished by shipping based on 
.0 or .1 releases, or because they are jointly developing a feature with other 
members of the FreeBSD community.  We definitely do not want to discourage 
carefully reasoned use of -CURRENT in products, while recognising the risks 
associated with an in-progress software revision.  Certainly, we want to avoid 
bumping developers off -CURRENT, and the goal should be to keep -CURRENT 
maximially usable at all times -- in early FreeBSD development cycles, we saw 
the severe problems associated with not doing so (e.g., 3.x-era VM work that 
pushed many developers off -CURRENT for even personal work).

Robert