Re: tlug: Mozilla, uh, M15

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Shimpei" == Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com> writes:

    Shimpei> Well, but if you have M15, you can just apply the patch
    Shimpei> to get to M16, and that's both faster and
    Shimpei> network-friendlier than rigamoling around with CVS.

True.  Of course, you could always wait for the release of the next CD
of <insert Mozilla-including distro name here> too, and upgrade your
whole system with no network access at all.

    Shimpei> Right? Right?...Oh, I see. They *don't* provide patches
    Shimpei> between milestones.  The bastards.

Why do that?  Every project I know of that has changed patch policy
has changed in the direction of only providing patches between
milestones.  It is too easy to screw up, unless you go to the trouble
of doing fresh CVS checkouts of both revisions.  It also means that
you have to go to the trouble of quality control on the patches.

I saw one XEmacs release (20.4) where two of the last four pre-
releases simply corrected distribution errors that caused the
application to build incorrectly on some platform.  That kind of stuff
has gone way down since the Review Board made a policy decision that
CVS was the primary means of distribution of the development sources.

You can argue timing of milestones, of course, but I don't see this
policy as bad as such.

    Shimpei> CVS is a pretty server-unfriendly way of disseminating
    Shimpei> inter-release patches, but if mozilla.org wants it that
    Shimpei> way, that's their problem.

Do we distribute patches for the benefit of servers?  I thought we did
it for developers.  ;-)

CVS also makes it possible to back out bad changes in a regular way,
without the cooperation of the release engineer.

True, people with poor or expensive bandwidth suffer somewhat under
CVS if they're irregular about updates.  So they should partner up
with somebody who has better access.

OTOH, I've been doing approximately monthly updates on XEmacs over a
(normally) 14.4k connection for a while, and that doesn't bother me
much, takes 30 minutes sometimes.  Maybe twice as long as with a
direct connection.  I think that probably much of the time is in the
server generating patch and updates, not in transmission.  (I know
that most servers request limiting compression to -z3, so there is
some server burden---but that's their problem, as you point out.)

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