Re: Cygwin Release process

["lhall at pop dot ma dot ultranet dot com" <lhall at pop dot ma dot ultranet dot com>]

Bill,

This subject has been discussed before on this list.  May I suggest you
review the email archives if you plan to further pursue the discussion
here?  
It would be a great help if any discussion of this topic covered some new 
ground.

As it stands, the Cygwin distribution as available through cygwin.com and
it's mirrors contain the current version (or versions) that the maintainers
of the packages feel comfortable supporting.  These are the packages that
users should install if they want to be able to ask the list for help with
any issues they might encounter when using the packages.  Supporting other
versions of these packages (older or newer) is at the discretion of the 
individual package maintainers.

Currently, there is no configuration management to the releases of Cygwin.  
Convenient mechanisms for tracking package version dependencies don't exist
yet in setup.exe.  This, at least, would be a requirement before setup.exe
could support a notion of what you're talking about.  But this is only a 
minor part of the requirements the your "request" implies.  For now, if you
need this kind of control, it needs to be managed by a local mirror.  Doing
this gives you full control over the packages available and the versions.
Without volunteers to support more, this is likely to be your best option
at this time.

HTH,

Larry
 
Original Message:
-----------------
From: William A. Hoffman billlist@nycap.rr.com
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:30:43 -0500
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Cygwin Release process


What I am suggesting is taking the same approach as Debian.
Each package in Debian is in one of these states:
Stable, Testing, or Unstable.

Stable packages - should work.
Testing packages - working on becoming the next stable version
Unstable packages - all other packages, might be working towards Testing
status.

At some point in time, all Stable packages are collected up, and
a Stable Debian release is made.   Only security patches can be applied
to the packages that make up a stable release.   

I think it is very important to have an entire cygwin that is stable.
As it is now, when you run Setup, you have no idea what you will get.
It is likely to be very different than the machine you did last week.

Almost every time I update cygwin I get some sort of unexpected problem.
Last time it was the ntsecurity stuff, that is now fixed, but for a week or
two,
the "Stable" cygwin, did not work on networked XP machines.   Just this
last time, I got a copy of tclsh83.exe installed into /usr/bin that does
not follow the naming convention, (it should be cygtclsh83)   This caused
problems on my machine.  

If I run Setup today, I may get some other problem.   There really needs to
be a stable snapshot of the entire cygwin.   It would be a known quantity,
with
expected problems.    It is much like working with CVS.
You have periodic releases of the software that are put on a CVS release
branch, the
branch only gets serious errors fixes, but no new development is done on
the branch.
Brave folks and developers, that need the current development, can cvs
update from
the main tree.    

I realize that software changes quickly, but there are folks that just want
to use cygwin.   We still have machines that ran setup a year ago, and for
what they need to do, cygwin works fine.    I really do not think it would
be
that much to ask for a stable snapshot of the all the packages in cygwin
three times
a year.   Only serious bugs and security problems can be patched on the
packages 
in the release of cygwin.

"Moving to Fast" is exactly the problem.   You can not have stable and fast
moving
development at the same time.  Stable means working and un-changed.   

Lets say I have ten computers that I want to install cygwin on.   If I go
around
to each computer and run setup, by the time I am done, I could have 10
different installations of cygwin, and each computer may run slightly
different.   I do not
see how that is stable.

stable:
- Resistant to change of position or condition; not easily moved or
disturbed: a house built on stable ground; a stable platform. 
- Not subject to sudden or extreme change or fluctuation: a stable economy;
a stable currency. 

As a whole cygwin is a very un-stable platform, because each of the
packages that make
up cygwin, are in constant motion.


-Bill


At 01:55 PM 1/23/2003 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>William,
>
>At 13:39 2003-01-23, William A. Hoffman wrote:
>>Is there any way to control the versions of programs you get from
setup.exe?
>>The cygwin environment is different on almost every machine at our
company.
>>It all depends on when you ran the setup program.    I have two
suggestions:
>
>The Cygwin Setup.exe installer offers you the current release-level
version, the previous version (if any) and, sometimes, a forward-looking
"experimental" version.
>
>
>>1. It would be nice, if there was a cygwin-stable that had a list of
stable
>>packages that you could download.   This would be updated two to three
times a
>>year, with testing.   I belive Debian does something like this.
>
>The software comprising Cygwin moves much too fast to have releases only a
"few times" each year. The "current" release is always deemed stable by the
authors and / or maintainers. It usually is (stable, i.e.).



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