FreeBSD9 and the sheer number of problem reports

[Peter Maloney]

Am 23.02.2012 21:15, schrieb Mark Felder:
> On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:25:01 -0600, Damien Fleuriot <ml at my.gd> wrote:
>
>>
>> Now, I find the number of problem reports regarding 9.0-RELEASE alarming
>> and I'm growing more and more fearful towards it.
>
> Then stick with the 8.x train until it's no longer supported. Also,
> don't you know the rule about running .0 releases in production? :)
>
> 9.0 had LOTS of changes. They were very important. It's going to take
> a while for the community to fully absorb them and bugs to be worked
> out. We don't have enough testers of -CURRENT to prevent this.
> Everything seemed stable (ie, no release blockers) for the people
> running -CURRENT and -PRERELEASE, BETAs, and RCs, so it was released.
This is quite a good explanation, but what can be done in the future, so
either people are testing, or more report problems?

I suggest these concepts should be tested:

Perhaps the testers tested beta1 and beta2, but there were so many
changes after beta2, that bugs appeared in release that did not exist in
beta2. Test this by reproducing things reported in release also in beta1
or 2.

Perhaps the people who know the rule about running .0 releases (such as
myself) never bothered to test beta1, beta2, or even release .0 (true in
my case). If so, then this rule is a very bad one. Test this with a poll.

Perhaps people are more interested in a preview of what new features
they can expect, rather than actually planning on testing and submitting
PRs. Test this also with a poll. To fix this problem, you could add an
automatic bug reporting system like crash handlers in many applications
(Mozilla had this long ago; KDE has this, etc.).When dealing with
drivers, hard disks, removable devices, etc., the devs can't test every
case, but the users can, so until the FreeBSD Foundation can afford a
huge test lab with every combination of hardware, strengthening user
feedback is more important than internal testing.

>
> But as always, TEST TEST TEST and please have a proper staging/test
> environment before you throw your production into 9.x.
>
> Only YOU can prevent forest fires^W^W unplanned outages.
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