Over the last year or so our freezes have become shorter and less dramatic, which has been great, and my impresssion is that generally people are happy about this. After consulting with Thomas, I'd like to nudge us a bit more to fewer changes in freeze and to continue the faster freeze cycle. The freeze for 2017Q1 will start at March 21 at 0000Z, with expected branch cut around March 29-31. I'd like this freeze to be bug and security fixes only (with micro-version updates ok to carry security fixes) -- more or less the stable branch pullup criteria. So please update anything you want updated for the branch now, rather than during the freeze. (This is less welcoming to in-freeze leaf package updates than before, and to updates that could have been done pre-freeze but weren't, but otherwise more or less the same.) Starting now, please only make changes to pkgsrc if: You are confident that the changes will not cause problems (including new failures to build on less-common platforms, and depending packages newly failing to build), but that if problems arise, you will be able to fix them, and will actually fix them, by the time the freeze starts. I don't intend to ask you to refrain in many situations, and the above is intentionally non-specific about changes (only consequences), so there is no notion of asking for exceptions. As an example, it would probably not be prudent this week to update a widely-used library to a new version with a different build system, or to a new branch which removes support for a bunch of deprecated interfaces. But if you think something is maybe too disruptive and important to be in this branch, feel free to ask on tech-pkg for other opinions. While this message is primarily aimed at those with commit access, the assistance of everyone in the pkgsrc community is appreciated in creating another quality branch. Everyone can help by updating their trees to pkgsrc-current, starting any time but especially once the freeze starts, and building and testing the software they rely on (via bulk builds, pkg_rolling-replace, or whatever), reporting issues, and providing fixes. Thanks, Greg
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