Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/01/27/18:08:21
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 04:54:25PM -0500, Scott Prive wrote:
>William,
>
>The "ntsec" problem by all accounts was a one-time switch that burned a
>lot of people. It seems like a great feature (not completely using it
>myself), and when I upgraded to it I had NO idea of the impending
>change. I should have known better than to perform blind upgrades.
>
>I've been using Cywin for maybe 3 years (?) now and that's the only
>major problem I ever had. It's STILL not resolved, and I do not have
>time to attempt correcting it since I have required level of
>functionality.
>
>I'd love to see a release process something like Redhat's or Debian's.
>But that's not enough -- someone has to maintain it. As a FORMER ;-)
>Debian user I can say there are some downsides to too much process...
>like a "stable" tag that's so old almost no one runs 100% from that
>branch.
Ok, that's three people complaining about the ntsec change. Don't you
see some faulty reasoning here? How long do you suppose CYGWIN=ntsec
existed? It was around for years. Lots of people used it. There was
no way to anticipate that it would cause problems for some people.
If we had made the decision to turn CYGWIN=ntsec on in the next major
"stable" release, then all of horrendous problems that were suffered
(which, AFAIK, are "solved" these days by saying CYGWIN=nontsec) would
still have manifested.
The change *was* announced. The functionality *was* previously tested.
This is not an argument for a stable release. On the contrary, it's an
argument for quick corrective releases to fix the problem.
You make a good point about the old, stable release. That's one of the
drawbacks of such a plan. What about errata? Are errata going to be
supplied for the stable release? Who is going to decide when to make
a new release? Is there going to be a voting process? Who gets to
vote? Who gets to arbitrate disputes?
Debian has a structure for this kind of thing. So does Red Hat. I don't
see any evidence that the Cygwin community has the type of committment
required for this kind of activity and, I, certainly don't want to be
worrying about stuff like this. It requires someone with both the desire
and organizational skills to pull it together. The effort to do this
can't be trivialized.
I will happily provide the disk space for this but I am not going to be
changing the way I release the packages I provide. If someone wants to
take my packages, decide if they are "experimental" or "stable", and put
them into a different release framework then more power to them. Seriously.
I'll applaud and commend their efforts.
cgf
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