ARRRRGH! Guys, who's breaking -STABLE's GMIRROR code?!

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Hans Lambermont wrote:

> Julian H. Stacey wrote:
>
>> Stable is a misnomer that harms FreeBSD somewhat.
>
> I agree.
>
>> A promoter of FreeBSD I know has long encouraged people to upgrade
>> from release to stable. Some don't & won't realise Stable is Not
>> necessarily Stable, & may get burnt.  Much of the world speaks English
>> only as a 2nd language.  They won't benefit from the double trouble of
>> foreign + weird BSD geek speak:  "Stable isn't Stable ?  Yes or No !"
>> "It's stable, but it's OK to crash ?  - I'll go Linux !"
>>
>> Imagine a boat labelled Stable: It sinks. The designers claim: "Tough!
>> We left the Application Interface  (routes to bars & toilets) stable,
>> but changed other stuff.   Hey ! Stable never meant Stable !
>>
>> It'd be some work to eradicate the misnomer, but the name's perhaps
>> less entrenched than one might guess, eg:
>> 	ftp ftp.freebsd.org
>> 	cd /pub/FreeBSD
>> 	dir
>> 	lrwxr-xr-x   1 ftpuser  ftpusers        19 Mar 24 14:58 FreeBSD-stable -> branches/4.0-stable
>> 	cd  FreeBSD-stable
>> 	550 No such directory.
>
> Why not rename 'stable' into 'stable-api' ?

Or rename it what it is:

6.x-BETA

Where x == the next -RELEASE ...

But, I'm just curious here ... for all of the talk going around about this 
whole issue, how many ppl have truly ever been bitten by an unstable 
-STABLE?  And for those that have, how long did it take to get help from a 
developer to get it fixed?

In the case that started this thread, it seems to be that the developer 
fixed his mistake fairly quickly, which is what one would expect ... it 
shouldn't be so much that he *broke* -STABLE (shit happens, do you want 
your money back?), but it should be 'was he around to reverse his mistake 
in a reasonable amount of time?' ... ?


  ----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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