Re: suggest renaming and extending the -CURRENT and -STABLE lines

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:08:47 +0200 Marian Hettwer wrote:

Would you please take a look at you line break? These long lines are quite
hard to read on some readers mutt and slrn (which I use) are among them.

>> YMMV.  I run both CURRENT and STABLE on production systems.
> Which is higly interesting and important and has basically nothing to do
> with the original mail / question by the original author ;-)

I think that was meant to say that there is nothing that has to be done. I
guess everybody has to make his or her own experiences. After something
bad happens on a production system, thoughts about bleeding edge do tend
to change a little... :-)

> Back to topic?  The problem is, that STABLE in FreeBSD-speak is meant as
> API Stable, not stable in regards to a broken driver or in regards to a
> branch where the source is frozen.

That part I know. :-)

> However, I do agree with the original author that it leads to confusion,
> because API stabilitiy is not the first thing that pops into your mind
> when you read FreeBSD 6-STABLE ;-)

Actually, it's not even the second or third - aspecially since many of the
people using FreeBSD don't even know (yet) what that is or it even exists.
The terms we use should be understanable to the people who have to work
with them. And even to an expert, the fact that -STABLE actually means
-ABISTABLE isn't all that clear off hand either. I had discussions with
people at university about this subject: "If it's a car, then for God's
sake, call it a car and not 'a powered vehical utilizing rubber wheels for
optimized traction' which could mean anything from a car, a motorbike, a
truck right up to a plane."

> I tend to believe that a renaming won't happen, though. AFAIK the naming
> convention in FreeBSD haven't changed since... well... forever? ;) 

Well, since FreeBSD has a finite history, we can be sure that it's not
been like this forever. :-)

> It may became something like a holy cow :)

Yeah - and that may be a problem. I've noticed that there is a certain
problem in many people in and about open source projects to be critical
about what happened in the past. In fact, I think that many improvements
to Linux got in far too late because it was considered an insult to
critisize *the* kernel. I know I was beaten up several times
(figuratively) after pointing out that the documentation for many
OS-projects simply sucks - and I gave reasons and arguments for that at
the time, including suggestions for changes. BTW. FreeBSD wasn't among
these projects. But noone wanted my input so I just shut up.

I hope FreeBSD can live without a holy cow because a holy cow sure as hell
will not speed up progress.

> PS.: I managed to run CURRENT from yesterday on a IBM HS21 Blade with
> this bloody mpt(4) and bce(4) chipsets. It works! Thumbs Up! The bce(4)
> was panicing in earlier CURRENTs I tried :) 

Isn't that more like something you'd discuss on a sado/maso list? :-)

Regards
Chris