Re: Release 2.12

[Alan Modra <amodra at bigpond dot net dot au>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 09:50:03PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 11:08:41AM +0930, Alan Modra wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 09:26:54PM -0400, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:
> > > I'd like to propose H.J. as release manager for a 2.12 branch.
> > > Assuming that you (H.J.) are interested, and that you would
> > > consider doing the lot, not just GNU/Linux.
> > 
> > I like the idea.  I was going to suggest that the 2.12 fork should
> > coincide with one of HJ's releases in order to benefit from the testing
> > that H.J. puts into his releases.  As HP commented to me in private
> > mail, H.J. is already acting as release manager.  The number of people
> > using HJ's releases should speak loudly; if he was doing something wrong
> > there would be a large scale migration of linux users back to FSF
> > releases.
> 
> While I support the idea, I'd like to strongly disagree with the last
> part of your reasoning.

Which part?  "if he was doing something wrong there would be a large scale
migration of linux users back to FSF releases."?  Regardless of your
opinion regarding the level of testing, I'd say it was fairly obvious
that most linux people see HJ's releases as "better" than the FSF ones.
Mind you, I run CVS head binutils all the time.  ;-)

> Both Debian and Hard Hat use H. J.'s binutils for roughly the same
> reasons - they have marginally more testing than "pick a day, take a
> snapshot".  Marginally.  If there was some better cross between every
> eight months and weekly - for instance, if the release branch received
> active bug fixes, when critical bugs were found - then things might be
> quite different.

The real question here is "why don't debian and hard hat use FSF
binutils releases in preference to HJ's releases?"

Alan