[1739] in Release_7.7_team
Athena 8.3 alpha test
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Apr 1 19:10:32 1999
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 19:10:26 -0500
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: athena-rcc@MIT.EDU, f_l@MIT.EDU, kcr@MIT.EDU, zacheiss@MIT.EDU,
kretch@MIT.EDU, jweiss@MIT.EDU, mbarker@MIT.EDU, ghudson@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
The Athena 8.3 alpha test phase begins tonight for the Solaris
platform. The SGI platform test will follow in a day or so, since it
takes a lot longer to test updates on that platform.
The Athena 8.3 release continues to use Solaris 2.6. (We will apply a
bunch of Solaris patches at some point during the alpha test period,
but right now they aren't there.) Some new things in the Athena
software in this release:
* A bunch of upgrade to externally maintained software. emacs
20.3, some tex-related upgrades, a BIND upgrade, some other
stuff.
* A glitzy new screensaver program, installed as xss.
* A new printing system, LPRng.
... and the usual pile of small changes and bug fixes. See
/afs/dev.mit.edu/project/relnotes/rel83.tex for a draft of the system
release notes. A select few items in there aren't actually reflected
on the packs just yet because they were committed in the last few days
(or in the case of international fonts, aren't getting installed
because tb still has to fix the build system).
Even if your machine is configured with AUTOUPDATE true, it will not
take the 8.3 alpha release automatically. To take the release
manually, do a console login as root (type Control-p at the xlogin
window and log in as root using the text login display) and run:
detach -O -a
attach -O dev-sun4sys-83
/srvd/update_ws
# Watch, or go do something else for five minutes or so.
shutdown -y -i6 -g0
Alpha test is only appropriate for machines which can be reinstalled
without nonrecoverable damage. During this phase of testing, the
release may eat your machine, although I hope it won't. Also, not all
changes to the system packs will be reflected in update version
scripts, so during the testing period you could wind up with a machine
slightly inconsistent with how it should be. (For at least the
Solaris patches we'll introduce an 8.3.1, though, I think, to make
sure they get tested.) The system packs can and hopefully will be
completely rebuilt every few days, which can cause long-running
processes like emacs and rlogin to dump core.
We're going into alpha with one known bug:
* The BIND 8.2 named returns a SERVFAIL result on class HS
queries. The main visible effect is that accounts without
group lists (like systest) will get a spurious error message
at login time about not being able to update their group
list.
Here is a list of alpha Solaris machines and their contacts:
Machine name Contact
------------ -------
central-services kcr
florey kcr
maleficent athena-rcc,zacheiss
pianoforte f_l
pinocchio athena-rcc,zacheiss
spatula-city kretch
speaker-for-the-dead jweiss
thankyou mbarker
the-colour-of-magic ghudson
