Re: Squid-3.0.PRE

Hi Henrik,

Il 00.00 09/03/2005 Henrik Nordstrom ha scritto:

>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.

Yes, I agree, ALPHA is not a good idea.

>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.

Probably the main problem is that we have a release that was named PRE, but
it was (and now is still) not at the PRE source quality code level, causing
some confusion.

>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.

For me a 3.0 PRE release should have at least the same functionality of
current 2.5, plus any 3.0 specific improvement. And as I know, in 3.0 we
are still lacking a decent NTLM support, but some work is currently in
progress on the SPNEGO side.
If we want reach a PRE quality point in a few time, we could target for
PRE4 a NTLM negotiate support with no more challenge reuse and target for
PRE5 full SPNEGO support.

>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..

I like the RC release concept: for peoples it's something different and
better than PRE.

Regards

Guido

-
========================================================
Guido Serassio
Acme Consulting S.r.l. - Microsoft Certified Partner
Via Lucia Savarino, 1 10098 - Rivoli (TO) - ITALY
Tel. : +39.011.9530135 Fax. : +39.011.9781115
Email: guido.serassio@acmeconsulting.it
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Received on Thu Mar 10 2005 - 06:22:15 MST