7 release timetable

[Bruce A. Mah]

If memory serves me right, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Quoting Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> (from Thu, 13 Sep 2007  
> 09:22:10 +1000):
> 
>> I don't want this to sound like a "is it ready yet?" email, but as we
>> are rolling out some new servers in the next months I'd like to get
>> some idea of whether it is time for us to start testing hardware and
>> configurations against current, ready for deployment in the not distant
>> future. In particular I am very interested in the excellent
>> improvements for SMP and mysql performance.
> 
> The source of 7-current is frozen. This means all changes have to be  
> approved by our release engineering team. If you test _now_ and report  
> problems you may see, the chance is high that those problems get fixed  
> before 7.0 is released. Some people already use 7-current in  
> production (but this is not recommended by the developers of FreeBSD).

(Speaking for myself, not for re@ as a whole.)

I think that if the OP is interested in *testing* against hardware he
might deploy later this year, then yes, starting to play with CURRENT is
a good idea.  The basic feature set is complete for the most part, and
ABI/API changes are pretty much done (with a couple of outstanding
items).  Do watch out for (and report) bugs, although realize that
there's ongoing bugfixing work still in progress.

>> * The bug reports at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi
>> don't seem to correlate with activity on current. Is there a separate
>> bug tracker so that users like myself can see what known bugs remain
>> prior to release? Other open source projects I am affiliated with (for
>> example those at Apache) use bug tracking databases in this way. Or is
>> FreeBSD a little more organic with each developer keeping their own
>> todo list.
> 
> There's no separate bug tracker. Typically bugs for -current are  
> reported on this mailinglist and people either directly have a look at  
> it, or request that people open up a bug report in our bug tracker.  
> The critical bugs are currently tracked by the release engineering  
> team. There was even a commit to the webpages which contains an  
> initial list of known problems prior to beta1, but this list didn't  
> contain all bugs which where reported to current at . I don't know if the  
> list of known defects the release engineering team has is the same as  
> what is available in CVS.

The recent commit to the Web pages was a result of an email conversation
amongst re@ where we tried to list the biggest outstanding items.  I am
not a big fan of listing every little bug on status pages because long
experience has shown that these tend to get out of date.  I usually keep
an eye on messages to the freebsd-current@ (or freebsd-stable@, as
appropriate) list to see what issues people run into.

At this point, the two classes of fixes that are at the forefront of my
brain are:  TCP and locking.  Both of these have ongoing work that's
being tested and evaluated prior to being committed.

>> * Is there a set release schedule and known bugs notes for snapshots?
> 
> No, there's nothing like this for snapshots. This would be too much  
> work. We only have this for releases.

Well, we try to do snapshots about once a month, at the start of the
month.  The September snapshot builds for CURRENT and 6-STABLE are being
built now.  We usually don't do much, if anything, in terms of listing
known bugs for snapshots.

RELENG_7 branching is dependent on a few ABI-changing patches and maybe
some TCP work...after that we should be able to do the first of the
7.0-BETA builds.

>> I'd like to try a snapshot but I don't know whether to wait a
>> day/week/month for the next one. Or are they released just when someone
>> thinks the source is in a good overall state?
> 
> They are released periodically. AFAIK there's no runability check  
> before a snapshot goes out, the only requirement is that it builds  
> correctly.

Well, we do a *little* more than that...our standard procedure is to do
at least a smoke test to make sure that a snapshot at least boots and
installs, although beyond that there's not a lot of functional testing.

BETA builds (when they start) will get a little more attention, as will
the RC builds leading up to the actual 7.0 release.

Bruce.


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