[2122] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: RedHat-Athena 5.1 packages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Tue Sep 1 14:41:47 1998
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Salvatore Valente <svalente@MIT.EDU>, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
From: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Date: 01 Sep 1998 14:41:30 -0400
In-Reply-To: Greg Hudson's message of Tue, 01 Sep 1998 13:38:14 EDT
1) 4.2 didn't need to take several months. It could have taken a
couple of weeks. However, no one ever decided to "release" the thing.
There was zero work done on it for several months, and many people
complaining about it. Eventually it "just got released". We can
remove those several months of zero work from the process in order to
speed it up.
2) Although I admire Sal for doing work, it doesn't help when other
people want to work on it, too. We don't have a 5.1 test machine in
the office. We don't even have a 5.1 BUILD machine in the office. So
how is anyone supposed to know what the current state is or what other
people have done?
I have a lot of time to put into the release right now, but I don't
have the resources nor do I have the information I need in order to do
a lot of this work. I'm glad that others are working on the release,
too. I'm glad that progress is being made.
But I'd like to use my time to parallelize the process. And that
seems difficult given the current state of the world.
-derek
Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU> writes:
> So, speaking as someone who has a lot of experience with Athena
> releases, I think you're taking the wrong approach here. When SIPB
> did the RH-A 4.2 release, you had the same level of insistence that it
> had to happen in a matter of days, and it still took several months.
> Expect it to take a while; we don't even know what the problems are
> yet which need to be solved, because there hasn't been any testing.
> Learn how work is being done, rather than making statements like, "if
> we can't seem to get changes made in the source-tree proper."
>
> Sal's work was to experiment with the software and to update the
> package lists. As such, his approach made perfect sense. The first
> full build of the source tree will definitely not be the last.
--
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH
warlord@MIT.EDU PGP key available
