Ok, clearly we've sparked some good discussion.

At this time, I would like to ask the macppc community to discuss
whether or not we should petition core to drop macppc from the RC cycle
until we get a better handle on these bugs. 2.0 is a major milestone for
NetBSD, and I don't think we should put something out that isn't as
polished as possible. I understand through the grapevine that if we were
to ask for the cycle freeze we would not be the only port to do this
(actually, it might be imposed as opposed to voluntarily on a couple
ports, but we are under consideration as well).

When I first got into writing software as an independent MacOS
developer, I released a product that ended up taking off. Encouraged by
my success, I developed three additional products that applied the same
concept to other aspects of the MacOS. I also had translators working on
over ten translations of the ReadMe files. Two problems occured: 1) a
bug showed up that took me weeks to solve, and 2) I couldn't get the
translators coordinated and because of differences in the languages it
was difficult to come to a consensus. 

I really, really wanted to have this huge, monolithic release, where I
just took the world by storm with my massive multilingual documentation
and so very useful utilities. I kept holding up releasing until I had
everything all nice and tight. Three months went by, and I finally got
the bug fixed (which affected only _one_ of the four products). I had
no translations, as everyone just kinda moved on. I made my
announcements anyways and just sat back and waited. And waited. And
waited. 

You see, while I was so focused on this massive, monolithic approach,
the rest of the world forgot about my products and other people released
similar products. I never recaptured the momentum that I had. Now and
then, I would even see "whatever happened to him" messages on the
Internet.

In hindsight, I never should have held up releasing anything that was
fully functional. I should have held off releasing the one of the three
new products that had the bug in it, and released the other two. I
should not have held up because I needed translations. 

One thing I learned is that there is a reason why companies make press
releases over even the smallest, irrelevant details. It keeps the
company in people's minds. I could have gotten more publicity and more
interest if I released as the products were finished and just kept
making announcements about new translations. Why? Because lots of people
would have been emailing and asking, "hey, when will utility x be
ready?"

My point is, we are in danger of holding up the 2.0 release. We can't do
that. We are better off freezing the RC cycle until we meet our own
milestones, like a rock solid X. Then, when we are synced with the
latest tag, we can announce that macppc is tagged. And when we finally
reach -release quality, we do another announcement. Everytime we do an
announcement it brings publicity for NetBSD. That is a lot better than
releasing something as 2.0 that is probably a step backwards from 1.6.2,
due to architectural/port issues and not due to the 2.0 kernel.

sincerely,
tim