Re: FreeBSD 6.0-RC1 available

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 05:55:11PM +0200, Andy Hilker wrote:
> Is it possible to include this minor patch for rc-ng scripts? It
> ist present since 5.3 or earlier...

I hate to pick on any particular poster, but, folks ...

We're at the tail-end (I **hope**) of a release cycle that began (if
you take 'src freeze' as 'began') on 10 June 2005.  This means we just
entered the 4th month of it (2.5 of which have been in either ports
freeze or thaw).

For comparision 5.3 ran from 16 Aug 2004 to 5 Nov 2004, in which ports
was frozen or thawed for 2 months.  (And we thought _that_ hurt at the
time!)

This long cycle is really putting the ports team at a disadvantage because
there are certain thing we just can't do in a thaw, and all we do during
freezes is bugfixes.

The first rule of software engineering is that "the final product will
have bugs" and the second rule of software engineering is "eventually
you have to ship a product".  If we held off any release until GNATS was
empty we could just all stop now because they arrive faster than we have
current volunteers to fix them.

People really need to be realistic about what can and can not be fixed
and when.  Once you're already 2 months past your initial deadline, and
counting, the only things that should be going in are things that would
otherwise be completely deadly to us.  Everything else is going to have
to catch the next train because this one is pulling away from the platform.

End of rant.  No, I'm not on Release Engineering, so I can't speak for
them.  OTOH I _do_ have many (too many) years of professional experience
and I _can_ speak for it.

And again, this is not directed at OP, there's been several people
within a couple of days asking almost the exact same question.

mcl