4.8-RELEASE vs SA-03:07

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 02:21:16PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 10:54:44PM +0300, Jarkko Santala wrote:
> 
> > IMHO _nothing_ should be called X.Y-RELEASE unless it is truly
> > X.Y-RELEASE. This goes for any files on ftp and any cvs repositories. Once
> > you tag something as X.Y-RELEASE or once you make any files public with
> > that name on it, it becomes that release.
> 
> A consequence of having an open source repository is that people have
> access during every stage of the release engineering process.  Are you
> suggesting that all source access be locked out from the time the tag
> is laid down until it's been tested and passes final QA?  Needing to
> adjust tags is a normal and expected part of making a FreeBSD
> release..without it the releases would be much poorer quality.

I think this does not automaticly follow. If you use the -RC label for
identifying the release when it's in a state of final QA and not to
identify the release when it's in -ALPHA or -BETA state, then you avoid
using the -RELEASE label when it's still possible that tags slide.
Of course the downside is that once you built and validated the -RC bits,
and are ready to call it "The Release", you have to put down the actual
-RELEASE label (on top of the -RC label) and rebuild the release from
scratch so that the actual release will include the sources that have
the -RELEASE tag. This generally causes a couple of days delay, but
will assure that if you put down a -RELEASE tag, it will be the release.

It's a naming issue, not a process issue. I don't think our naming
is immediately obvious, which causes confusion at first and triggers
threads like this...

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