Alan DuBoff writes: > On Tuesday 03 April 2007 10:18 am, James Carlson wrote: > > My guess is that we'll eventually need community-level decisions on > > when major releases are needed and will have to deal with the gate > > issues at that time. > > Why so?
When the first major release binding project integrates, we've got a problem. Those who still want to create minor releases will essentially be unable to do so. At best, they'll be able to fork the source at that point, and just "hope" that some of the subsequent projects being done in the current gate can be retooled to fit in the old one without too much trouble. It's likely that this situation would not last long. Major release binding projects, by their very nature, are disruptive things. > What if the train just kept rolling and the distributions were responsible > for > their own decisions on what is major/minor for them? I realize this could > cause some confusion where distributions don't have the same major levels and > such, but at some point the distributions are going to be different. I see > that more at the distribution level to determine when/how the major minor > effects their distributions. That sounds like chaos to me. What is "major," "minor," or "micro" is an architectural matter, not something that a distributor can "decide" on his own. In other words, a change that breaks only Volatile and Private interfaces is generally acceptable in a micro release, one that breaks Uncommitted is for minor, and one that breaks everything is doable only in a major release. There's some trivial amount of wiggle room around each point, but there are certainly hard-and-fast issues here that can't be waved away. I suspect that distributions can make some important decisions about content, and perhaps even determine when to pull a minor release out of a string of minor-compatible changes, but that only the community can make effective decisions about release binding. Alan DuBoff writes: > But that's nothing more than some arbitrary mojo to say, "today this is > v5.11". No. Please see the release and interface taxonomies. These exist for a reason. They're not just "mojo." We've all been spoilt in Solaris be a long train of minor releases, and given a false sense of continuity. Things are quite a bit different for products that have major releases. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
