RFC: New FreeBSD support model

[Glen Barber]

Disclaimer: This is not an intended to slow down progress, but to point
out some issues that became apparent in some form since being on RE.

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 10:35:32AM +0100, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Glen Barber <gjb at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > We've heard back from Alfred and Michael, and I'll assume that the lack
> > of response from the others in CC was due to disinterest or lack of
> > objections.
> 
> Sorry, lack of objections on my part, based on the assumption that this
> is identical to the Google Docs document we worked on.
> 
> Right now I'm more interested in talking about how we're going to
> achieve this:
> 
>  - how do we build and distribute release packages?
>  - how do we build and distribute SA / EN updates?

These two are going to be particularly troublesome, I fear.

One of the things I, as RE, do not like about our release engineering
process is that it currently takes two separate teams to produce and
publish a new release - RE for building and testing what is intended to
be the release, be it -BETA, -RC, or -RELEASE, as well as SO/secteam for
building binary upgrade bits.

One of the specific problems that needs to be pointed out is that
neither team has any insight into the other team's process or progress.

This has caused problems on more than one occasion, for seemingly minor
and/or simple changes, such as upgrading the release build machines (see
r257136 and r258536, for example).

>  - what needs to change in bsdinstall?

I think very little user-visible changes need to be made.  We would
still have the concept of a "default installation", with which the "base
distribution" would be a meta-package of dependencies.

>  - do we want installworld to register packages, and how do we do it?
> 

I suspect the same (or similar) way local installation from the ports
tree does now.

> and other questions I can't think of at the moment.
> 

Glen

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