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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