[2694] in Release_7.7_team
Release status
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sat Apr 14 15:53:56 2001
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 15:53:45 -0400
Message-Id: <200104141953.PAA03204@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Alpha has begun, two weeks late. Most likely this will manifest in
the release coming out at least two weeks late.
For those who would like a peek into the release engineering back box,
here are a list of the issues I am currently tracking, in rough
priority order.
* On Linux, update_ws succeeds and then doesn't terminate for
some reason. This isn't a big deal for manual updates but
is obviously a bit deal for automatic updates if it happens
in that case. If the fix for this problem involves a change
to the update_ws script, then life will be better if we can
fix this before the 8.4 patch propagation day (which is the
23rd).
* xalf doesn't work, so launching stuff from the GNOME panel
is pretty broken, as is control center.
* On Solaris and IRIX, we have not analyzed the increase in
space usage and have thus not provided safeguards against
filling up the disk during an update.
* We have not examined 9.0 machines to determine if any
unwanted daemons are running which we want to disable. (And
we never determined what our exposure is for running all
those CORBA processes which are part of GNOME.)
* panel-wrapper doesn't die when the X server exits, but sits
and spins instead.
* gnome-terminal doesn't work on IRIX, even after you fix the
really big problem. Bob has looked at the remaining
problems and has declared them difficult to fix so far. We
need to decide whether to keep on debugging, punt
gnome-terminal on IRIX, or punt gnome-terminal on all
platforms.
* On Linux, xlogin doesn't conceal your password (plus, the
cursor looks wrong), presumably due to an change in the X
libraries. Andrew is looking into this.
* There's some kind of stale esd process issue which I haven't
fully looked into.
* On Linux, the xinetd startup at boot time takes a little
while, suggesting that something is wrong.
* On Solaris, we should track some files from /usr/athena
local when there is sufficient space, or the release will
probably be unacceptably slow.
* We have not yet coded all of the "revert to dash interface"
option.
* We have not yet coded the "revert GNOME settings to default"
option.
* On Solaris and IRIX, my build system changes have left me
without a way to bump the patch release version without
changing packs/build/version in the source tree.
* On Linux, rpm 4.x contrives to strip binaries before they
are packed into the RPM, which could make debugging problems
very difficult. I think fixing this is just a matter of
tweaking a config file on the build machine (and that there
is no better answer), but I need to figure out how to do
that.
* I noticed a file /srvd/po-mode.el in the system packs, which
should obviously not be there.
* On Solaris in particular, a lot of machines (hopefully only
sun4m machines) will need to be reinstalled in order to take
the update.
Most of these issues will block the beta release if they aren't solved
within a month.
