[1297] in NetBSD-Development
Packs management
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sat Apr 20 13:04:16 1996
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 13:03:54 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
Okay, since starting my job, I have observed several things about
release engineering:
* Getting the update infrastructure in place will be somewhat
laborious, since it's really pretty kludgy in the Athena
tree.
* The advantages of having frozen packs are sort of nullified
if you don't have a corresponding frozen source tree or CVS
branch. (I noted this problem when I put the new packs into
production, but underestimated its importance.)
* It's not uncommon for Craig to make a change to the Athena
cell packs and release them without doing a letter bump.
(This probably wouldn't be the case if the patch field of
the version number weren't limited to 26 increments.) Some
machines wind up requiring a "mkserv update," but that's
obviously not a problem for us.
Therefore, I plan to thaw the packs a little and fix some bugs on them
without trying to do a real patch release. However, I do want to
preserve one important thing:
* All changes to the packs should be reported to netbsd-dev,
including a list of precisely what files were updated.
The packs are currently administerable by system:netbsd-releng, which
contains a few people's root instances; to update the packs, you will
have to get root tokens, set the directories you want to update
writable, update the files in question, and then reset the acls on
those directories.
I plan to phase in the following changes:
* Make olcr use the correct path for sendmail
* kerberos fixes (PRNG fixes, support for kerberos4 port)
(I don't plan to recompile everything using the kerberos
libraries, since it's not important right now).
* emacs fixes (site-init, .saves files)
* Upgrade to perl 5.002
* mkserv should look in the sipb cell for update scripts
* rkinit bugfix
* techinfo "attach -d" should lose -d
* Install xdsc
I will send mail about them as I install the fixes. There's also the
following bug, which I haven't yet analyzed:
* repl -filter doesn't work properly if you follow the
procedure in the stock answers for including messages you're
replying to.
Unfortunately, most of the items I currently have on my list involve
the local disk and can't be fixed by updating the packs:
* Improved installation procedure
* Consider enabling ahe* device
* Having an ed4 at IRQ 11 causes many machines to hang at boot
* Update installed CellServDB
* Update AFS license to list correct site contacts
* Update named config (localhost resolution, root servers)
* New sendmail.cf fixing repeat message problem
* reactivate should stop paying attention to passwd.local
* detach doesn't deal with unmounted NFS lockers properly
* We should have a full set of root dotfiles, like other
Athena platforms.
* Update login to use getopt (interact properly with -current
getty).
* Update aklog (I've forgotten the reason for this; need to
check).
* /etc/services should have kerberos4 instead of kerberos-sec.
* config_afs should use listsuidcells instead of setting every
cell nosetuid.
Some of these can be partially dealt with using /srvd/patch.
