On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 03:04:35AM +0200, Zbigniew Baniewski wrote:
quoted text
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 08:48:47PM -0400, Jason Beaudoin wrote:
> 
> > the devs have been hard at work for many years, and I'd be willing to
> > bet that they like the system they've come up with. If they didn't,
> > they'd change it.
> 
> But it's pretty valid to ask? I thought, that's the mailing lists are for.
> 
> Maybe I'm wrong.

No, it's a valid question. There are hints of answers and even answers if
you read the mailing-list archives, but it's possible to overlook them.

Let me explain things to you another way.

OpenBSD tries to have quality releases, with several goals. Those goals 
include keeping support for a variety of non mainstream architectures alive.
There are various reasons for that, one of which being that it is useful
for i386/amd64, because some other arches are good at finding some classes
of bugs that affect all arches, but are more apparent on strict alignment
architectures (for instance). It's also good because it attracts kernel and
driver developers.

With that in mind, OpenBSD-current is always high quality, in theory.
In practice, comes release time, building and testing the release on each
and every arch weeds out hundreds of bugs... and takes a big chunk of time
and nerves out of Theo, and some other people involved. Thus the very quick
reaction.

We're trying hard to go up, up, up and have better and better releases.

If you read the archives, you'll see lots of calls to test things, in a
real community spirit, instead of the current `gimme, gimme, gimme' frame
of mind a lot of our users have...

so there have been some hard choices with respect to support, especially
wrt backporting stuff to -stable, or actually making these releases.

There will be hard choices in the future, undoubtedly.

Hence the harsh reactions from the people involved in the release process.

Just read the ml around `release build time' (which was a few months back,
actually, that's how slow the release process is), and you'll figure out
for yourself why `a release a month' is a bad idea, and also why the people
involved reacted so violently to your apparently innocuous email...
it kind-of implies the release process is something trivial you can change
as you want, which it obviously is not... and it also dismisses the ten
years of experience that our fearless leader has. Kind of insulting, don't
you think ? ;-)


Contrarily to what you might think, this email is NOT an exhaustive 
description of things as they are. It's a very quick, oversimplified summary,
of a taxing process and decisions. There are glaring mistakes, for the sake
of simplification. In a nutshell, release is ways harder to do than you think.