> I think the solution here is to change the release mechanism slightly.
> I believe we made a huge mistake splitting of the 4.x tree from 3.x
> so early.
I was going to make a point about this, but thank you for making it
for me. :-)
My point was going to be that it was clearly not possible to please
even a large fraction of the FreeBSD user base with respect to
scheduling and Matt's statement above only underscores that in
flashing neon. Those who were actually around at the time will
remember that the -current branch had already gone "dot zero" with 3.0
and still we refused to branch 3.x-stable, despite great public
pressure to do so. More months went by and finally the -current
branch was running on 18 months with no branch, many feeling compelled
to comment that we were supposed to "roll over" every 12 months and
that this extra 6 month delay was unconscionable.
Many arguments about how we were holding up progress and that
volunteers were going to start wandering off to other *BSD projects
were raised, along with more dire predictions, and finally enough was
enough and we set a date by which all the late committers should get
their stuff in so that we could finally branch the sucker. We did so
and there was much rejoicing, at least up until now when various folks
felt compelled to creatively reinterpret history and turn an
"unconscionable delay" into a "precipitous rush to branch."
I tell you, it's just not possible to win, especially when those doing
the most yelling are always conspicuously absent when crunch time
comes. Matt wasn't really fully on board at the time and I'm not
pointing my finger at him specifically, but it seems like everyone's
hindsight is 20-20 whereas their immediate vision concerning what
needs to be fixed in a timely fashion often comes closer to the legal
definition of blindness. If you want to make this or any other branch
a decent release target, the time to start is not 10 days before it
enters a feature freeze, the time to start is right after it branches!
It's my hope that people will take this lesson more to heart when 4.0's
own time to branch comes up.
- Jordan
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