Re: Release Engineering Status Report

Bill Moran wrote:
> 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.
> 

Patches have been floated on the mailing list that revert PAE in its
various stages.  Maybe those need to be brought back up.  Silby?  Tor?

Scott