Re: Stable tag will be slipped Sunday and release engineering will begin Monday

[Max Okumoto <okumoto@xxxxxxxx>]

Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
 > Bill, I don't think you've actually used Debian.  Try it and see.
> As for me, "resilient" is not the word I would think of when
> considering the FreeBSD ports tree.  I remember at least 2 serious
> snafus (involving libpng and gettext), and have forgotten dozens of
> minor hiccups, in my 4-5 years of using FreeBSD.  Usually nowadays,
> when such a major disruptive upgrade happens, detailed portupgrade
> instructions are posted on the lists, and things still seem to go
> wrong for users.
>
> Rahul

I have to agree with Bill here.  The ports tree is amzaingly stable
given the resources and flexiable polices it has for allowing changes
to things contained in it.

It is dynamic stability, vs static stability.  If FreeBSD required
that everything work all the time, then the software in the tree
would get out of date really fast.  Stable but old.

The main problem with it is that everyone is effectively using
DEVEL checkout.  And in most cases, everyone has a different
copy of /usr/ports on thier system.  There is no baseline, that
everyone has that is the same.

					Max