Still on the release process

[Murray Stokely]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 07:35:37AM +0300, Jarkko Santala wrote:
> 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.

Those people mostly buy their CDROMs from a vendor.

> 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.

"flying about" implies that they will be distributed further which I
think is quite erroneous.  A few people may have downloaded the wrong
ISO images, but thats the end of it.  Those few people may never
realize they have the wrong ISO since the changes are so minor.  The
mirror operators and vendors are distributing the correct ISOs.

> IMHO there are two solutions to this problem: either don't make mistakes

A third is to stop distributing ISO images altogether.

> or change the release process. Mistakes always happen and you shouldn't

Changing the FTP distribution process I think makes a lot more sense
if we were to go this route.  There's a huge delay between when
something goes onto ftp-master and it is announced, during which time
minor problems are sometimes found (I sure wish more people would find
these during the RC phase!).

Still, thank you for the mail many of this has been discussed before
and will be further considered as we seek to make improvements to the
process.

      - Murray
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