On Thu, Feb 27, 2003, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > >... JMB wrote: > > I doubt the usefulness of this. i386 kernels were just > > accidentally broken for almost a month and a half without > > anyone noticing. >Well, doesn't that suggest that it would be GOOD if the release process itself had to build a GENERIC_I386 kernel?
It's never good to add to your release cycle something you don't build/validate during development. Releases are painful enough that you don't want to turn them into testbeds. If it's not worth testing during development, it's not worth releasing...
Okay, that also makes good sense. But if that is true, then maybe we should officially tell our users that they *must* stay with the 4.x-series if they are running 386 hardware. I do think that the project has plenty of work with 5.x-series, particularly as we try to add sparc64, ppc, and maybe more hardware platforms.
We do have a lot to test already, and there is no sense pretending to support i386 when we don't have the resources or the inclination to really test it. I think we're hitting that grey area where we do not really support i386, but for pride's sake we don't quite want to admit that 5.x will not support it.
Perhaps we should start calling it "freebsd/i486" instead of i386.
I am not quite sure how my comments sound here, so let me just say that I do not mean to be sarcastic in any way. I'm just saying that for the benefit of freebsd's users, we probably need to make a clear statement that 5.x is not appropriate for true 80386 chips.
We do have every intention of keeping 4.x "actively improving" for at least another year, and I think the 386-embedded users would be happier if they stay with that and did not waste time trying 5.x. I also imagine that developers will be happier applying important fixes to 4.x (for the 386 users), than fielding complaints on 5.x about how the kernel broke for 386-ers.
That's just my 2 cents though. Any decision that makes sense to kernel developers and release engineers is fine by me.
-- Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
