Re: Printing setup script

Am Montag, 27. August 2007 18:10:00 schrieb Terry Mackintosh:
<snip>
> What I guess I'm getting at is that when you have a single release that
> is so long standing that it comes to be viewed as possibly the final
> release of the project, then the latest-greatest is finally released, it
> is inappropriate to immediately disregard the now old release.  The fact
> is that with the exception of those of you whom are in a continuous
> upgrade cycle, the majority of us that use ROCK are probably running
> 2.0.3 as that is what there was for the longest time.  My build is I
> think over a year old, and until about a month ago was still the latest
> release (trunk excepted).

Hi Terry, 
I see that support for older versions of ROCK Linux may be important to users, 
but it also means more work for developers.
During the developer meeting at the CLT in March 2006, we decided to change 
the development model and the way we handle releases:
First of all, there's no more development tree, and we just use trunk as the 
stable tree. To ensure that trunk remains bug-free and usable, we have strict 
requirements for patches that are applied to trunk, esp. build- and run-time 
tests with bootdisk and crystal targets, and no known regressions.
Official releases are now simply snapshots of trunk accompanied by pre-built 
binaries for some targets. To make releases even more stable than trunk, 
there is a feature freeze (only bugfixes and security patches are applied) 
and extended testing period with release candidates before the release is 
made.
Releases are not maintained or updated by the developers, in particular we 
don't back-port bug fixes or security updates. The major reason is the lack 
of manpower to do this properly for a longer period of time. Since trunk is 
also stable and easy-to-use for non-developers, the usefulness of maintaining 
releases is small compared to the costs.
Following these changes, ROCK 3 was released on the 26th of July in 2006 and 
so has been available for more than a year. Some weeks after this release, 
the 2.0 releases were declared unsupported, mostly because release 3 was (and 
still is) considered to be better than 2.0.x. 2.0.3 was (I think) about two 
years old by then and already replaced by the 2.1 development tree (at least 
wrt. developer interest).

For our development model see also 
http://www.rocklinux.org/wiki/Mission_Statement and 
http://www.rocklinux.org/wiki/ROCK3 for changes in ROCK 3.

With best regards,
Stefan Fiedler