bf and potato, history issue (was Re: bf rewrite?)

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE> writes:

> We wanted to freeze potato last year but had no working boot-floppies
> handy.  Only very few people have worked on it.

This is partially true but not quite true.  I hope I don't sound
defensive, but it's my opinion that bf on its own was not a major
delay factor.

Maybe the release manager would have another impression though.

To cite some details defending this position:

By the time of code freeze, we had already had 4 iterations of
boot-floppies; contrasted with 2.1.0 boot-floppies, which didn't
happen until after freeze.

In fact, I took over for Enrique in August, if I recall, precisely
because I didn't want to go into freeze again without a
semi-functional bf.

I think that by version 2.2.9 (28 Mar) we had a pretty functional
release quality set, at least for i386.  Pretty much all major changes
after that were just enhancements, more hardware supported (like
RAID), and of course, modutils problems (still going on).

For other arches, working through the device support and boot-loader
support took longer.

However, I don't want to downplay the complexities and rather
nightmarish problem of trying to get the release out -- and bf shares
all those nightmarish quantities.   

Coordination on the kernel versions and all the damn i386 flavors
(kernel, modules, pcmcia) was a major issue.

Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to blame bf for the Potato release
delays, really.

Not that I'm saying the system shouldn't radically be simplified.

-- 
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>