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Message-Id: <5.2.0.9.0.20030127112956.01136520@pop.nycap.rr.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:30:43 -0500
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: "William A. Hoffman" <billlist AT nycap DOT rr DOT com>
Subject: Re: Cygwin Release process
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What I am suggesting is taking the same approach as Debian.
Each package in Debian is in one of these states:
Stable, Testing, or Unstable.

Stable packages - should work.
Testing packages - working on becoming the next stable version
Unstable packages - all other packages, might be working towards Testing status.

At some point in time, all Stable packages are collected up, and
a Stable Debian release is made.   Only security patches can be applied
to the packages that make up a stable release.   

I think it is very important to have an entire cygwin that is stable.
As it is now, when you run Setup, you have no idea what you will get.
It is likely to be very different than the machine you did last week.

Almost every time I update cygwin I get some sort of unexpected problem.
Last time it was the ntsecurity stuff, that is now fixed, but for a week or two,
the "Stable" cygwin, did not work on networked XP machines.   Just this
last time, I got a copy of tclsh83.exe installed into /usr/bin that does
not follow the naming convention, (it should be cygtclsh83)   This caused
problems on my machine.  

If I run Setup today, I may get some other problem.   There really needs to
be a stable snapshot of the entire cygwin.   It would be a known quantity, with
expected problems.    It is much like working with CVS.
You have periodic releases of the software that are put on a CVS release branch, the
branch only gets serious errors fixes, but no new development is done on the branch.
Brave folks and developers, that need the current development, can cvs update from
the main tree.    

I realize that software changes quickly, but there are folks that just want
to use cygwin.   We still have machines that ran setup a year ago, and for
what they need to do, cygwin works fine.    I really do not think it would be
that much to ask for a stable snapshot of the all the packages in cygwin three times
a year.   Only serious bugs and security problems can be patched on the packages 
in the release of cygwin.

"Moving to Fast" is exactly the problem.   You can not have stable and fast moving
development at the same time.  Stable means working and un-changed.   

Lets say I have ten computers that I want to install cygwin on.   If I go around
to each computer and run setup, by the time I am done, I could have 10 different installations of cygwin, and each computer may run slightly different.   I do not
see how that is stable.

stable:
- Resistant to change of position or condition; not easily moved or disturbed: a house built on stable ground; a stable platform. 
- Not subject to sudden or extreme change or fluctuation: a stable economy; a stable currency. 

As a whole cygwin is a very un-stable platform, because each of the packages that make
up cygwin, are in constant motion.


-Bill


At 01:55 PM 1/23/2003 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>William,
>
>At 13:39 2003-01-23, William A. Hoffman wrote:
>>Is there any way to control the versions of programs you get from setup.exe?
>>The cygwin environment is different on almost every machine at our company.
>>It all depends on when you ran the setup program.    I have two suggestions:
>
>The Cygwin Setup.exe installer offers you the current release-level version, the previous version (if any) and, sometimes, a forward-looking "experimental" version.
>
>
>>1. It would be nice, if there was a cygwin-stable that had a list of stable
>>packages that you could download.   This would be updated two to three times a
>>year, with testing.   I belive Debian does something like this.
>
>The software comprising Cygwin moves much too fast to have releases only a "few times" each year. The "current" release is always deemed stable by the authors and / or maintainers. It usually is (stable, i.e.).


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