4.8-RELEASE status

[Bruce A. Mah]

Hi--

A number of you have been (rightfully) wondering what's up with
the i386 4.8-RELEASE.  Here's the current state:

The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE
can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes
on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk.

This bug was masked by another problem that happened to be present on
the machines used by the RE team to build releases...namely, that they
didn't have the cvsroot-all collection in their local repositories.
To make a long story short, the $FreeBSD$ tags didn't get expanded in
the source files, thus (I am not making this up) causing the MFSROOT
kernel to be just a *little* bit smaller so that it could fit on a
floppy.  I think this was the world's April Fool's joke to the RE
team.

We're currently trying to fix this by finding some other driver we can
move to a module on the mfsroot.flp image (or maybe just eliminate).
After we finish some tests, we'll need to commit whatever change is
required, re-tag the affected files, and then rebuild the base system.

I'm not in a position to comment on a timeline for these happenings.

Thanks for your continued patience!

Bruce.

PS.  This may sound rude, for which I apologize in advance:  The less
time that the RE team has to spend replying to various emails
(particularly those that are not relevant to the immediate goal of
shipping 4.8-RELEASE), the faster the release is probably going to be
finished.

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