[1022] in Release_7.7_team
Possibly delaying bug found
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Jun 30 15:54:56 1997
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 15:54:46 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Today I noticed a problem which has to be solved before the public 8.1
release. A workstation which is set to autoupdate will attach the 8.1
packs and then wait up to four hours to update, which means it's in a
broken state for up to four hours. If that weren't bad enough, if the
workstation is public, it runs track against the new srvd and manages
to grab the new /etc/athena/attach.conf and (for reasons I'm not yet
sure of) not the new /etc/athena/reactivate, so it can't attach its
packs. At that point the machine needs manual attention.
Unfortunately, the only "easy" fix is ripping out the
desynchronization changes we introduced some months ago. According to
Jonathon, that "borders on unacceptable" from ASO's point of view, and
I agree that it would be poor.
Using input from Jonathon and Craig, I've worked out a design for
fixing the problem while still desynchronizing updates. It means
putting out an 8.0 patch release. Under this plan, machines which
don't take 8.0I will take the 8.1 update just fine, but they'll do it
immediately instead of desynchronizing.
If everything goes well, we can still put out the 8.1 release in two
weeks. But we may want to slip another week to acquire confidence in
the new design. We can talk about it tomorrow.
