> In any even I think it would be of paramount importance for final fixes
> to be made to the 'build' rule set during the release procedure to
> ensure that simply typing 'make build' will always upgrade a previous
> binary release to the new release from source without worry.  This is
> indeed easy enough to test, provided you have a spare machine on which
> the previous binary release can be installed, and obviously at least
> some of us are able to do this.

In my opinion, this is unreasonable.

It's quite easy to get into a situation where 'make build' just can't
do this...  (e.g.: need new config to build new kernel, need new libs
for new config, need new kernel for new libs.)

This is _exactly_ what binary snapshots and upgrades are for.


In my opinion -- and note that 'make build' is used in my release
build process -- i consider 'make build' to be used for building
identical, or slightly-changed sources into a working system.

If there is a serious dependency graph that needs to be handled, to
rebuild from sources, somebody should:
	(1) document it to current-users, so that users can
	    do it themselves, by hand, if they really want to, and
	(2) provide a binary snapshot.


Please, don't crowd 'make build' with this, and don't change the
top-level makefile as often as would be necessary to make this work in
the few 'serious' cases where it's actually possible.



cgd