On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, James Sharp wrote:

> I always thought it was caveat emptor...snapshots are likely to blow chow
> at any given moment...don't trust real data on them...burning ring of fire
> & all that.
>
> Just curious...or maybe what i've been told about snapshots is wrong.

No, that's true. However, this problem had been known for a month
before I downloaded and tried to use the snapshot, and nobody
bothered even to create a README in that snapshot directory giving
a warning about this. That's what I find a bit frustrating.

And really, that disclaimer is fine, but let's face it, people have
to use snapshots in production systems. The most recent release
becomes very much not recent long before the next major release,
and the patches just don't catch up. NetBSD 1.5.2 won't even boot
on the DS-20s I was using.

Now you could say that the correct solution to this is to release
more often, fold more patches into the last major release, etc.
But that's not happening, and when you look at how much work it is
to do that, it's not a huge suprise. There's a reasonable argument
to be made that it's a better use of our very limited manpower to
work on current rather than the last release, and compensate for
the age of releases by trying to make stable snapshots.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC