> On Aug 7, 2019, at 00:24, Quanah Gibson-Mount <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> --On Tuesday, August 06, 2019 9:27 PM -0400 David Magda
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> You mention binary packages on the website:
>>
>> http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/108.html
>
> The FAQ explicitly states:
>
> "Official releases are in source form only." I don't know how that could be
> any clearer.
Yes, I’m sure all the people who I have seen come to this list running an
older, distro-supplied RPM/Deb have read that, ignored it, and posted anyways
thinking “surely they can’t be serious”. As an admin I know that all / most of
the software in a distro is out-of-date, but there are not enough hours in the
day to compile-from-source all the software that is used: that’s why distros
were invented in the first place, to save everyone time.
> People who write the list are already provided the information on these
> options. What would the project having yet another build of the same things
> provide?
Perhaps all of these people started providing these binaries because the
project itself didn’t / doesn’t? Maybe all of those other efforts could be
refocused to build binaries served from (say) repos.openldap.org. The
infrastructure seems to already be present: perhaps it just needs to be
centralized / concentrated?
>> So 2015 was quite product, but most of 2016-2017... not so much.
>
> 2015 had a lot of serious bugs in its release, the releases were rushed, and
> the result of rushing was bad. I don't think 2015 is a "good" example of how
> things should be done.
That is an argument for timed releases. The OpenBSD project is a good example:
they release twice a year. If a feature cannot be made stable in time for one
release, they either back it out or do not commit in the first place, and
simply try to make it work for the following one. There is actually less
pressure to force a feature (that may or may not be ready) in a particular
release, because the next one will be along shortly. When releases are ad hoc,
there is actually more pressure because people start thinking “if we don’t get
it in this release, who knows when the next opportunity will be”.
