[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 04:39:49PM +1000 I heard the voice of
Martin Pool, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> The Proposal
> ************

Speaking as the maintainer of the FreeBSD port (and just to be sure at
least someone isn't wholly in favor), this makes things a bit muddier.

With the current system, it all Just Works.  A new release comes out,
I update the port (tempered as necessary by my existing awareness of
the development and known issues; that's the maintainer's job after
all).  The given scheme basically reads as "everything like now,
except that every 6th release gets more bugfixes backported and point
releases made from it, we change the numbering scheme around".  This
leaves me, as the maintainer, with several choices:

1) Package the biyearly releases.  This is an easy choice to make in a
   mature product, but in something still relatively young (and still
   making significant regular strides), that's kinda icky.  I mean, if
   I wanted to always run outdated versions of everything, I could
   just use Debian   ;)

2) Package the monthlies.  This yields, in effect, exactly the
   existing situation, but will be harder for me to swallow and harder
   if necessary to justify, since now it'll practically always be
   called 'some.thing beta'.  Icky.

3) Deal with two ports, using the existing for either the stable or
   monthlies, and creating a bazaar-ng-devel or bazaar-ng-stable port
   for the other.  Liable to get me lynched by people concerned over
   our dwindling supply of hyphens.  Does potentially ugly things to
   dependancies of depending ports.  And, well, icky.

4) Resign maintainership, hop a flight to Tijuana, and forget
   computers exist.  Not so icky, but my email would get pretty backed
   up after a while...



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.