Re: Planning for NetBSD 5.0

[Marc Tooley <netbsdmlpostno%spam.quake.ca@localhost>]

On Friday 01 August 2008, Christos Zoulas wrote:
[...]
> >> I think that maybe you're mistaking lack of public utterance about
> >> a 5.0 branch as being that nothing is happening, or that no plans
> >> have been made.  Believe me, nothing could be further from the
> >> truth.

Out of curiosity, are the non-public utterances somewhere where folks 
who track -current as closely as, say, I do, could read them and see 
more about what's going on?

Currently my sources of information are gnats, the pullup tickets on 
releng.netbsd.org, and what information I can glean from the public 
mailing lists like tech-kern or tech-net. (That, and I mirror the CVS 
archives for another two or so dozen machines, so I can see check-ins 
in individual files.)

I am also curious about whether there are any tools the NetBSD 
developers use to monitor or access the source code: what does Thor, 
for example, use to develop and check stuff in in CVS? How do you 
monitor incoming changes? Are there notification scripts that core 
relies on primarily?

> >At least to me it seemed plausible that the branching has been
> > delayed, because the feature freeze that was announced long ago
> > appeared some- what toothless, if not abandoned, judging from the
> > amount of newly added features (which I very much welcome, though).
>
> Actually most features were planned before the freeze. The reason we
> don't have a branch yet, is because there are some serious
> regressions in current that need to be addressed.

Much of this communication appears to be lost or opaque to us as users 
of NetBSD. If core knows about particular regressions that could affect 
those of us following -current, then perhaps people like myself could 
simply avoid a whole build-test cycle when it'd be pointless to do so. 
That is, I think our efforts could be better put towards testing stuff 
if we were more organised to do so. Currently, the best I can go on is 
the releng build reports, hope my own build mechanisms match up, and 
then cross my fingers that I'm not hitting a bug that's already been 
reported.

So this comes back to: is there more information somewhere you can point 
us towards?

-Marc