On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 22:03:27 -0700, "Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de>
said:
> Hi Doug,
> 
> > Same people that were working on 3.8 last month.  (Mostly yourself and 
> > Stephane and Marcus.)  I'm guessing the content will be what Stephane 
> > suggested in his 9/28 "plan for 3.8" post, sounds like it would be ready 
> > by the end of the year. (which does seem a bit quick after 3.8 but that's 
> > okay)
> >
> > (Hopefully there will not be too many write conflicts with the 
> > updates.list file on the updates server... that's where hand-editing the 
> > file can be a bit dangerous. ;) )
> 
> I think we can make this happen without affecting anyone too much. The
> idea 
> would be to declare the unstable stream to be the road to 3.9 and 
> selectively re-order the updates for the "stable" stream. So what you'd
> get 
> in the unstable updates would be the 3.8 and 3.9 intermangled whereas in
> the 
> stable updates these are well-ordered. I don't see too many problems with 
> this and it would certainly simplify the situation and avoid any
> rewriting 
> of the server's update lists.

That sounds about right to me.  My only comment would be that using the
stable stream for the m17n/3.8 release and the unstable stream for the
future 3.9 release should be a very short term situation.  As soon as
you declare 3.8beta (which I imagine would be very soon, within a
week?), we could just open the 3.9alpha stream and move everything
that's in the unstable stream into 3.9alpha (unstable).  Then the
3.9alpha folks can decide when to move their own stuff from unstable to
stable.

So, as the current Release Manager guy, I'd say we should go ahead with
your proposal.  (Taking Diego's concerns and everyone else's feedback
into account.)  In theory there should be very little impact on the
timing of the SmallLand-synched release.

My comment about the updates.list file was mostly just pointing out the
potential file-locking issue. :-)  As long as we don't have two people
writing to the file around the same time, we should be okay.  (The
original update-broadcasting mechanism doesn't work anymore, although
it'd probably be easy to fix, and probably should be fixed.  For myself,
when I was posting 30 updates at a time, it was easier to edit the
updates.list file by hand.  But since we now have a number of people
posting updates, if everyone does it by hand, there's a better chance of
having write conflicts.)  Although perhaps that was your point about
keeping the 3.9 stuff in unstable for a while longer, since the unstable
stream is a different physical file (SqCupdates.list).

- Doug