Re: Squid-3.0.PRE

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Serassio Guido wrote:

> I agree, we should have some preliminary stage, something like ALPHA or
> similar. PRE songs not so dissimilar from RC.

I don't see why such releases would be needed beyond the nightly snapshots
which by definition is ALPHA. We certainly do not want anyone to package
binaries of these as we know it won't work proper, and for people to be
able to submit meaningful bug reports they need debug symbols and
preferably source, both of which is not included in binary packaging.
Also, we do not want to attrakt too many people who have trouble to
use the debugger to extract stack traces on releases of this quality.

We have only ended up in this situation (no new PRE release in 1.5 years)
because Squid-3 has for a long period not received the attention it
deserves making the number of known bugs accumulate above the theshold
where PRE releases can be considered valid. The only way out of this is to
focus on getting the known bugs fixes moving HEAD back to the quality
level expected for a PRE release.

I know that I am partly responsible for this situation to occur in the
first place by not being able to forward-port my own bug fixes in 2.5 in a
reasonable rate, causing Squid-3 to not only detoriate from it's own bugs
but also from the large number of known and already fixed bugs still
existing in Squid-3, and I am is very sorry for this but the squid-2.5
maintenance has simply drained all the time I have had available and a
fair bit more.

But it is also true that if at least the current momentum can be kept then
we are not far from reaching the quality point where a new PRE release can
be motivated, but we need to at least get rid of the worst and most
striking bugs first.

I do think most users understands the difference between a PRE release
and a release candidate, or at least to have some kind of understanding
that there is a difference.

In my eyes

   - nightly snapshots or CVS is the bleeding edge, or ALPHA releases if
you prefer. These targets people with reasonable knowledge in how to build
and maintain Squid and who is not afraid of getting their hands dirty
while isolating bugs or to update Squid on a daily basis to get a problem
fixed.

   - PRE releases is milestones where the developers (us) is reasonably
happy about the quality of the distribution, allowing people to start
toying with the new features but knowing that it does not represent the
final design and features may still be missing or behave differently, but
having some level of assurance that it won't bite them too hard. For a
such frozen release to make sense in terms of release maintenance it
should be able to live for some time without needing huge amounts of
patches to be useable.

   - RC (Release Candidate) releases is short term releases in preparation
for a STABLE release. Should in theory not be needed, but that's in
theory..

   - STABLE, is well the supposedly STABLE release.

Regards
Henrik
Received on Tue Mar 08 2005 - 16:00:14 MST