quota deadlock on 6.1-RC1

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 06:21:39PM -0700, David Kirchner wrote:
> On 5/3/06, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >This means that
> >they will take a significant amount of time to fix, and that each fix is 
> >high
> >risk, as it is likely to reveal latent bugs.  This means that each fix will
> >require a lot of testing -- months of testing, in fact.  So the choice is
> >really, do we release 6.1, or do we skip it and do a 6.2 in a few months.  
> >As
> >the release engineer, Scott has concluded that releasing now offers a great
> >benefit to many people, although the bugs present may penalize some. Mind
> >you, in some cases the bugs also exist in 6.0, so they don't represent
> >regressions, so much as bugs that continue to persist.
> 
> However, one could argue that as quotas worked OK in releases prior to
> 6.0 (and perhaps earlier), that there is a longer-term regression.

There was a quota regression in 6.0.  It was fixed 2 months ago.
AFAIK snapshots and quotas are also broken in 5.x, so the remaining
problem is not a regression.  The reasons it cannot be fixed in 6.1
have already been discussed.

> I don't understand the need to issue a new release according to a
> strict schedule if it means leaving critical bugs that affect a
> fundamental feature of the OS: the filesystem itself.

I agree that you don't understand: the 6.1 release cycle has been
going on for over 3 months now, and the original ship date was passed
months ago.  This is not a "strict schedule" by any reasonable
definition of the term, and the release engineers have been extremely
flexible in slipping the dates to accomodate the many bugs that have
been fixed during the release cycle.

> This assumes that 6.1 absolutely must be released -- must it, in its
> current state? The VFS code is indeed incredibly complicated, but it
> is also absolutely critical. The server is completely useless if
> filesystem operations fail. Would there really be harm in putting off
> a release until these well-acknowledged bugs are taken care of?

Yes, it ties up a lot of developer resources and causes the release
engineers to burn out.

As several key developers have already explained, if you adopt a
policy of delaying the release until all serious bugs are fixed, there
will be no more releases of FreeBSD ever again.  I assume you don't
want that, which means that you have to draw a line somewhere.  The
line has now been drawn.

Kris
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