>Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 11:18:36 -0800
>From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis@mcmanis.com>
>
>So -current should be built with *ONLY* 1.4.x systems (stable tools) and
>then once 1.5 gets cut, -current can switch over to being built with the
>1.5 set. 

If 1.5 is built with 1.4 tools all the way up through the 1.5 release,
when does this new set of 1.5 tools get integrated into the system?
There seems to be a big paradox involved in your suggestion.

>Without this discipline you get to our current situation, and one that will
>only get worse, where you need -current to build -current. And if you don't
>have -current there is no straightforward way to build a release. Thus you
>impede new progress as new developers get "on board" with NO DEVELOPMENT
>VALUE IN TOOLS. 

I don't think it's nearly as bad as you make it sound.  I've been
tracking -current for several years on 4 different architectures, and
I've only encountered one or two situations where I couldn't figure
out how to build a -current system on an old binary installation.
Often a "make build" fails in this situation, but by rebuilding
a few tools first it's almost always trivial to bootstrap.  When it's
difficult or impossible to do so for some reason, you can just install
a more recent snapshot and rebuild from there.

New developers are going to install the latest snapshot, grab the
latest sources, and build.  I'm sure they will have "development value
in tools", whatever that may be...

For users of stable releases, the recommended upgrade path is always
to install the latest binary release.  Once that is done, a "make
build" is guaranteed to recompile the existing sytem from the released
source.  What's the problem?

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.