Wasn't there a lot of talk some time ago of actually having a formal release process and forking off "stable" branches in the CVS once in a while for people actually wanting to *use* Freenet.
The truth is that 0.3 is the last "stable" Freenet that was released. A download since then have been daily snapshots of the "In development" tree. If things seemed to have calmed down and the network works better then 0.3 then a stable fork (called whatever version number that you want) should be made and all future development should be done on a development trunk (called whatever version number you want ... -devel-pre-rc). If there are any nasty fundamental flaws in the security that are discovered then that could be backported to the latest stable branch. I realize that you don't want people to be using a particular version of Freenet but would rather have them keep up to date with the latest snapshot so that they can be lab rats. But that is dangerous for the people you are actually creating Freenet to serve. There is obviously a need for a stable (content-wise) Freenet now regardless of its current idiosynchasies. Michael > From: Ian Clarke <ian at freenetproject.org> > To: devl at freenetproject.org > Subject: [freenet-dev] Things to do > Date: 15 Aug 2002 04:08:33 -0700 > > I met a very interesting group of people at DEFCON who, believe it or > not, are actually using Freenet to disseminate information in China, > they have a website at http://freenet-china.org/. > > They have translated Freenet to Chinese and claim that they have a > healthy user-base, they are distributing it on floppy-disk (to do this > they have modified it to work with Microsoft's jview)! > > I pointed out that Freenet was still in development, but they assured me > that everyone using it is informed-of and fully accepts the risks. > > One thing that was somewhat shocking is that they are actually using > Freenet 0.3, when I asked them why they answered that the main problem > with 0.4 was that we keep obsoleting previous versions which makes it > unsuitable for their use at this time. This is a shame as 0.4 contains > a number of important security improvements over 0.3. > > Thus, I think we really need to consider seriously whether we can give > our user base some assurances as to how frequently we will increase the > last permitted build setting. It seems that given Freenet is working > relatively well right now (at least, better than 0.3) we might be > getting close. I would further argue that when we do this we should > call it 0.5 - we have procrastinated long enough. > > I would say, however, that one requirement for releasing 0.5 would be to > the the node distribution servlet working well, and start encouraging > people to use it. > > Thoughts? Comments? Insults? > > Ian. > > -- > Ian Clarke ian at freenetproject.org > Founder & Coordinator, The Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/ > Chief Technology Officer, Uprizer Inc. http://www.uprizer.com/ > Personal Homepage http://locut.us/ > ---- > _______________________________________________ devl mailing list devl at freenetproject.org http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
