Re: Release Engineering Status Report

Bruce Evans wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Maxim Konovalov wrote:
> 
> 
>>PAE MFC brought an incredible instability to stable branch.  It
>>affects 100% of our user community especially when we issued several
>>SAs since PAE commit.  They often can't switch to RELENG_4_x security
>>branches because even RELENG_4_8 misses several critical non-security
>>fixes.
> 
> 
> I merged PAE into my version of -current a bit at a time and didn't
> notice any problems (with PAE not actually configured) despite having
> some large logical inconsistencies from not having all of it.  Most
> of the global changes had no effect since they just changed the names
> of some typedefs without changing the underlying types in the !PAE
> case.  So I suspect that any instabilities in RELENG_4 in the !PAE
> case are indirectly related to PAE and/or localized and thus easy to
> find and fix.
> 
> Bruce
> 

Agreed.  PAE was merged into -stable in three steps.  Backing out the
third step and leaving the first two steps removes the instability.
Unfortunately, it was the third step that also was the most complex.
In any case, we have 2 weeks to find the resolution before the decision
must be made on keeping or tossing PAE.  Since PAE is a *highly*
sought after feature, it would be doing a disservice to our user base
to remove it without putting in some effort to fix it.

Scott