Re: versioning

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>]

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Andreas Jaeger wrote:

> I want to have some major release that we put on ftp.gnu.org as
> tarball and announce properly.  I'm under the impression that the
> bi-weekly "anchor-points" are not put up anywhere.

Somebody interested in this can surely create a cronjob to do just that.
 There is no reason why this shouldn't be possible.

I personally think tarballs are a completely unsuitable method for
distributing glibc.  It's OK for some other projects, but every time
such a glibc tarball has been created, it was already outdated.

The main and only useful method to distribute glibc is via cvs and it
has been clearly shown in the last months that this is perfectly acceptable.

And re announcements, again the question is "why?".  Everybody who has
to provide glibc for a larger group or is interested for herself will
notice or be pointed to the new policy and know that, say, every Monday
morning there is a new "release".  But, if this was the only motivation
for updating glibc in the past, that person has done an extremely poor
job[*] by not including all the important changes which went in since
the release.  Therefore, announcements serve no purpose (except ego
building on the authors' side) since everybody who reads the text and
grabbed the tarball also had to go to the current sources.


To summarize: IMO tarballs are the wrong form of distribution and
announcements are misleading since they "announce" a code base which by
itself is not the recommended one.


> There're outside some people that do not use cvs,

Then those have to go with the times unless somebody volunteers to
create tarballs (which is a mistake but I won't stop anybody making it).
 Using CVS is not the right way to distribute for all projects.  But the
glibc sources are stable and do not break.  At least not in ways which
would be noticed in the way releases were prepared in the past.


[*] E.g., those people who still report problems against the 2.3.2 tarball.

- -- 
â Ulrich Drepper â Red Hat, Inc. â 444 Castro St â Mountain View, CA â
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