The state of DragonFly and pkgsrc 2008Q4

[Hasso Tepper]

Matthias Schmidt wrote:
> We should adopt the following policy:  Before someone commits some big
> diff (like the mentioned one) or some stuff that breaks the
> API/whatever, the diff should be applied to clean machine which runs a
> full pkgsrc bulk build.  If the build fails, there is enough time to
> fix occurring problems and rebuild.  Once the bulk build runs fine, the
> diff can be committed to master.
>
> This takes some time and delays the introduction of new "features", but
> it should save us from broken pkgsrc builds ...

We have no resources for such tests and to fix things constantly ;). What 
I'd like to see though is kind of userspace API/ABI freeze. Not really 
hard freeze, but no such changes as introducing the reentrant functions 
was, no messing with hiding/disclosing stuff in headers (a la "hey, make 
it more standard compilant"), no "sync library libx with xBSD" commits 
etc, please.

We target our releases to end of January and to end of July. Q2 is 
released in the end of June and Q4 is released in the end of December. I 
think that it's reasonable to have soft API/ABI freeze two months before 
DragonFly release? It would leave a month to fix problems in pkgsrc.

Q1 and Q3 pkgsrc releases will be targeted to work on latest stable. It 
doesn't mean that these will not work on HEAD, they do mostly, but I at 
least don't make any extra effort fo that.


-- 
Hasso Tepper