[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 5.1 Released!

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 08:48:09PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 
> The problem is when we're approaching a release, and the
> messages on hubs@ arrive almost hourly saying that these
> releases and those packages have been uploaded.  Sometimes
> it is important to sync as fast as possible, because some
> things have only a short lifetime anyway, such as some
> release candidates.  This is where an automated "push" or
> notification mechanism would be really beneficial.
> 
> By the way, yesterday (the day 5.1-release went out) was
> a holiday in Germany ("Pfingstmontag"), and I guess in
> other parts of the world, too.  Another reason to have an
> automatism for syncing, because many people probably just
> weren't there to do things manually.
> 
> Maybe I'm wrong, though.  :-)

I'm not a mirror operator (IANAMO? :-) and I just recently
entered the playground by providing the ia64 release bits and
snapshots, but I can truely say that I'm amazed by how
unstructured this all is. So, in that respect I don't think
you're wrong.

It probably helps if we first try to state the problem without
expressing it in terms of current implementations. Once we know
what we want (don't want) or like (don't like) on an abstract
or functional level, we can worry about how to achieve that
(prevent it). Even if we cannot fully implement what we want
(don't want)...

For the hacker that only uploads bits my interest is pretty
limited: all I want is a simple procedure that when followed
sets all the wheels in motion and prevents the most common of
the mistakes...

-- 
 Marcel Moolenaar	  USPA: A-39004		 marcel at xcllnt.net