Re: pkgsrc-2013Q4 freeze started

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-12-19 at 14:30 GMT, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:

> Please consider stable branch users and binary packages users.
> 
> If no updates are committed during these two weeks, they won't be
> able to get new versions for three months, while small breakages
> in leaf packages can be easily fixed by pullups in any time.
> 
> I wonder if we can have simple but defined rules for leaf packags like:
> - no updates are allowed in the last two (or three) days of freeze
> - "minor" updates is allowed
> - "major" updates require prior approval (by MAINTAINER or PMC)
>  - all updates must have "complete changes list" in the commit log
> - any update that breaks build will be reverted silently
> etc.

We release every 13 weeks, and all we ask is that for the last 2 weeks
of each cycle we keep things as quiet as possible.  I don't think this
is unreasonable, especially when you look at the release cycles of
e.g. Debian where software is long obsolete before the release even
happens.  We are much, much faster in comparison.

The point of the freeze is that we can do bulk builds on slower
platforms and expose the top failures, at which point we can be
confident that fixing them will result in a net win, and not further
regressions which have been introduced since the build started.

2-3 days is nowhere near long enough to perform even an update bulk
build on a slow to medium platform, get the results and be able to act
upon them before the freeze.

We should also not rely on the releng process to fixup issues after
the freeze - as you point out we should consider binary package users,
and the 2013Q3 branch was pretty painful for them as there were a
number of pullups in the branch to core packages which resulted in
pretty much an entire rebuild of the branch at least twice.

With 13,000+ packages we are always going to be in the situation where
the latest and greatest is released during our freeze, but I'd rather
we concentrate on the stability of the branch overall rather than
rushing to get every last update in that we can.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com