Re: Release Engineering Status Report

Scott Long wrote:
> 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.

If someone who was involved in this would publish the date on which that
last commit was made, people who are experiencing problems, but wish to
stay as close to -STABLE as possible can use cvsup to revert their trees
to a date immediately prior to the commit.

This will solve both problems for now: i.e. the problem of users wanting
the bugfixes/new features of -STABLE will have a target they can cvsup to
that is reliable, while the developers can continue to pursue their goal
of having PAE in 4.9.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com