Still on the release process

[Jarkko Santala]

Hi,

One thing that has not been taken into consideration in discussions on
this topic afair is all the people who use FreeBSD, but don't subscribe
to any of the lists.

I'm sure there's a number of people out there that have already downloaded
the 4.8 iso-images, simply because they were there. What that means is
that the world will have two sets of cds flying about, ones that are
official and ones that are not.

This can also happen after the release, if for example a mirror breaks in
some way and stops mirroring FreeBSD contents. What they'll have in store
is an old version of iso-images which are broken. Of course one could
argue that you should always check the checksums or signatures, but that
doesn't really help the people who don't read the lists (the checksums on
their broken mirror may be quite correct for the broken images). And a lot
of people don't check them anyway.

Of course the same can happen with people using cvsup, although they are
more likely to read the mailing lists.

IMHO there are two solutions to this problem: either don't make mistakes
or change the release process. Mistakes always happen and you shouldn't
start blaming anyone for them, especially when talking about the best
operating system out there which you also happen to get for free.

As other people have also been discussing, my proposal would be to make it
so that the last RC will become the RELEASE and the RELEASE tags never
slide. If there was a bug in the release, the release process would be
stopped and x.x.1 would be tagged instead. I see no harm in releasing
x.x.1 instead if it means a better release.

This would perhaps mean that releases will take longer to come out, but
it would also mean that they would be better and the confusion which has
happened now would never happen again.

I hope re@ will consider everything that has been discussed. :)

Thanks,

	-jake

ps. sorry for starting a new thread, I was a bit too hasty in deleting
read emails before feeling the irresistable urge to post this message. :)

-- 
Jarkko Santala <jake at iki.fi>            http://www.iki.fi/~jake/
System Administrator                    2001:670:83:f08::/64