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Re: Upcoming freeze in preparation for pkgsrc-2014Q1 branch



I don't think we are trying to change anything about freeze guidelines,
and the following looks like what we've been following:

  http://www.netbsd.org/developers/pkgsrc/#rules

In my view, the point of process rules is to improve the outcome --
which is some complicated function of progress, stability, users having
good experiences on stable branch, and people who contribute to pkgsrc
wanting to keep doing so.  So we have a set of guidelines (with some
fuzz) now, and experience says they work well in producing high-quality
quarterly branches.

Updates during freeze have two issues:

  bulk builds have to rebuild things

  an update might break things on other platforms

and thus the general notion is to have a period of mostly fixing things
without introducing regressions and churn.  Updating to a new point
release of a leaf doesn't hurt much; non-leaf or major updates hurts
more. Human nature is to view the end-of-freeze time as the deadline for
getting some big update in for the next branch, and that's IMHO why we
ended up with guidelines.

We have a general notion that people should be reasonable given the
above goals (and they are), and when in doubt, propose/discuss rather
than just do something.  Sometimes we (pmc) say "go ahead", and
occasionally "too scary", but I think pmc has been entirely reasonable
about this and it's not a problem -- that's what change control boards
are for.

So hopefully that explains how things are.  I don't think it's useful to
wordsmith these rules much further.  So if you want to do something
during the freeze that you think is reasonable and outside the
guidelines, ask about it.  And if someone else commits something that
you think is a problem, please feel free to bring up specifics with
pkgsrc-pmc.  Otherwise, please hack away and fix bugs :)

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