What Do You Want?

Jeff Rizzo created the NetBSD 4 branch yesterday. It will result in the NetBSD 4.0 release in a few month from now. I’m personally not convinced that NetBSD-current was ready for this. There are e.g. compatibility problems between GCC 4.1.2 and GDB 5.3: you have to compile binaries with -gstabs or GDB won’t be able to load a core dump written by a program.

I however see Core’s point that branching now will probably help to stabilize things after a few weeks. But it will probably require a lot of pullup requests and therefore a lot of work by release engineering to get there. 🙁

But maybe there is no better way to deal with such things in large Open Source projects.

We, NetBSD’s release engineering team, finally finished the release cycle for NetBSD 3.0.1 today. It took (as usual) much longer than we a anticipated and wanted. Most of the delay was caused by stability problems of our build cluster. But Thor Lancelot Simon finally kicked it hard enough so that the build of the 3.0.1 binaries succeeded.