busybox_1_1_stable branch [was: Re: is NFS mounting borked in bb-1.1.1?]

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 10:48 am, Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> >I am entirely on board with the concept of stable releases and working
> > with a known base.  The problem here is that after more than a month of
> > "release is coming, stabilize, test what's in the tree", people only find
> > the actual bugs after the release.  And they're still trickling in,
> > another every couple
>
> Rob, just to be fair. You checked in your mount.c changes
> "The new, new mount rewrite.  (Mount double prime?)  Still being
> debugged, but" as rev14537:
> r14537 | landley | 2006-03-14 19:16:25 +0100 (Tue, 14 Mar 2006) | 5 lines
>
> About a week later (not a month), you created the 1.1.1 tarball
> (22-Mar-2006).

True.  It took way longer for me to finish that than I expected.

> >days.  If I made a 1.1.1.1 from the first few, the NFS thing would
> > definitely have been grounds for a 1.1.1.2.
>
> We're not the kernel, so there is absolutely no need for a forth (major,
> minor, patch, stepping) id, isn't it?

I hope not. :)

> I was under the impression that we now have 1.1.1, i.e.
> Major 1, Minor 1 (denoting stable branch ATM)
> and
> Patchlevel 1
>
> Why would you not want to bump the patchlevel but introduce a "stepping"
> or however you'd call it?

I wouldn't.  I guess this release should have been 1.2.

> >I'm trying to get the next major release out in June.  The problem with
>
> A major release would mean that we'd have a busybox-2.0

I meant the next stabilization of the development branch, which is not the 
same as a bugfixes-only release.

> >putting out a 1.1.1.1 is that in a day or two, there would be at least one
> >minor fix we'd want to apply on top of _that_.
>
> Anyway. I accept that although andersee seconded that a stable branch is
> a good thing, we won't have a stable branch.  Even if we'd have one, if 
> the official maintainer won't colaborate to keep it up to date, then it
> really makes no sense to create one in the first place.

I'm trying to stabilize -devel every three months so we don't get into the 
situation where we have new stuff in the tree for a year without it being 
part of a release.  Would you rather I ignore -devel?

> By now i also accept that we don't have the slightest announcement
> to the ML from our official maintainer about a 1.1.1 release,

Sorry about that.  I thought a message on the list saying "release happens 
tonight", mention of same on the IRC channel, followed by the actual release 
and the notice on the website covered it.  I'll post a message to the list 
next time.

Looking back at http://busybox.net/lists/busybox/2006-March/019450.html I 
suppose I was too subtle...

> not even a 
> casual notice that a detailed announcement will follow later on.

On the website, there was.

> I also accept that there isn't even a ChangeLog in the alleged release
> tarball.

The cumulative svn changelog is 2.3 megabytes.  I could snip out the bit from 
1.1.0 to 1.1.1 pretty easily, though.

I'm working on an english "what's new since 1.0" document, but unfortunately 
it's a biggish project and I have a number of other demands on my time.  This 
is the first I've heard of it being a priority for anybody else.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.