On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 06:44:28AM -0400, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 01:32:01AM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > No, I don't know what could break if ssh's priority changes. I do
> > know that something *might* break and that's enough justification for
> > Antti-Juhani, who is not the release manager, not to touch it in frozen.
dselect might not behave correctly with non-US packages being standard,
and boot-floppies might not cope. The non-US CD scripts might not put
non-US/standard in the right place, or might die horribly.
> Come on now. Let's not take a superstitious attitude towards our packages.
> They aren't magical.
No, but they are complicated enough to have implications that are
difficult to predict in advance. That's why we like having some time to
test that everything works as we expect before we claim they're "stable".
> Likewise, modifying package descriptions or other slabs of non-executable
> documentation -- or comments in code -- cannot reasonably be expected to
> cause problems.
But, of course, they could. It would, for example, require the source
package to be rebuilt for all architectures, which might reveal a probelm
with the build environment on some autobuilders, which might in turn
require a change in the build depends, or the package to be updated for
new library versions (if the last version was compiled on glibc2.0, eg).
Now sure, this is a definite Good Thing most of the time, but it's *not* a
good thing right at the end of the freeze.
> But placing a categorical ban on non-programmatic changes out of fear that
> you'll uncover someone else's irresponisibility is just plain stupid. We
> should be shining the light on such roaches, not letting them lurk
> undetected in our distribution. A freeze is for fixing problems, not
> covering them up.
No, a freeze is for fixing problems, not introducing new ones. You've
had, what, four months of freeze to fix these silly bugs, if you're not
done now, it's *too late*. Wait for woody and fix them then.
The closer we are to releasing, the smaller the changes we should be
making; right now we shouldn't be making *any* unnecessary changes
*at all*.
Cheers,
aj, who'd've thought Branden would've been much more timid about
apparently innocuous changes around the freeze after the X split.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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