HEADS UP ON -DEVELOPMENT

[Matthew Dillon]

    Joerg and I have discussed the struct stat and struct dirent changes.
    So far the stat work has been committed and the dirent work is still
    in progress.  This is work to increase ino_t from 32 to 64 bits and
    nlink_t from 16 to 32 bits.

    The major library revs were bumped between RELEASE and DEVELOPMENT,
    we have decided that we are NOT going to be bumping the library major
    revs again, let alone three times.

    This means that both the recent work in DEVELOPMENT/HEAD and shortly
    upcoming work will require a full recompile of everything... world,
    plus any installed programs, and when the dirent changes go in it
    will require another full recompile of everything.

    In this respect the DEVELOPMENT/HEAD tree should be considered somewhat
    unstable at the moment.  Not because of bugs, but because of these
    necessary changes to widely used structures.

    I have not slipped the PREVIEW tag.  I wanted to do it before the stat
    changes but there was a bit of miscommunication (the stat changes went
    in before the dirent changes were even started).  So at this point I 
    am going to wait for the dirent changes before slipping the PREVIEW 
    tag

    --

    In other news, all of our SMP testers have reported a huge improvement
    in stability with recent bug fixes.  The last bits of those fixes
    (in particular the softupdates fix) are being MFC'd to the RELEASE 
    branch today, and I will probably bump the release sub-version and
    slip the official release tag on Sunday.

    I think I can say with some assurance that the most aggregious SMP
    bugs have now been fixed.  Except for softupdates they all turned out
    to be fairly simple fixes, despite being very hard to find due to 
    their location.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>