On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 01:41:00PM +1200, Nicholas Lee wrote: > What's the policy regarding these release notes?
With respect to what? > The one prior to this was 20140515, and then there is a 20140530 release > inbetween. After this notice, there is 20140627 and currently/latest > 20140710. Yes, we cut builds every 2 weeks on Thursday. You can therefore expect to see a build on or about 20140724 too. The reason I didn't send notices is that I'm lazy, and the mails seemed to have little value, especially with the advent of the automatic build list page. I probably should have been more explicit about discontinuing them; sorry. So here it is: We cut builds every 2 weeks, on Thursday. Occasionally a build will be delayed for a day due to lack of build machines or other problems. You can always find the list of available builds at your [1]. If those things change, someone will announce that. > Are all builds or [1] considered stable enough for production use? Or > should we restrict ourselves to specific builds like this one that have > been explicitly notified on the mailing list? "Stable" has a specific architectural meaning, namely that an interface has not been or will not be modified incompatibly. It's not meaningful to talk about whether a release or build is "stable", only a specific interface. Unless noted otherwise, every build we cut preserves the stability of all documented Public interfaces. We do not currently anticipate breaking any of those interfaces in the near future (in Sun terminology, we do not have plans for a new Major Release). New interfaces, both Public and Private, are and will continue to be added. That's not the same thing as saying whether something can or should be used in production (or even what production means to you). It sounds like what you're really asking is whether these releases are broken. As far as we know, they aren't (however, as far as we know, they ARE -- because there is always a list of outstanding open bugs!). Our policy, which is the same as Sun's policy dating back decades now, is FCS Quality All The Time. That means that every time someone integrates a change into any of the repos comprising the platform, it is expected that their change is ready to ship. There is no allowance for "just getting it out there"; it's supposed to have been tested and to work. So in principle, every documented feature ought to be complete and ready to use, not only in every biweekly build *but in every single git SHA*. Note that not all features are documented, and sometimes a feature will come with explicit caveats described on this mailing list (e.g. LX). But that applies only to new features, never to existing functionality, and it's still expected that anything in the gate, however incomplete, will not break existing documented functionality, cause panics, etc. In practice, of course, SmartOS (the standalone single-node OS) is not a product. You didn't pay for it, and it doesn't come with a warranty of any kind. In this regard it is like any other random thing you download from the Internet: you're expected to judge for yourself whether it's suitable for your purpose. Only you can decide, because only you know what features you're planning to use, what your environment looks like, and the importance to your business of the application(s) in question. You're expected, where consistent with your fiduciary obligations to your shareholders, to perform your own testing and staging in an identical environment prior to using anything in production. Undoubtedly there are bugs in ANY software, and it is your responsibility to determine whether any of them will negatively affect your business if you use it in production. That's as true of SmartOS as of anything else, regardless of what someone on a mailing list tells you. This should be common sense. > If there is ever a major change/flag day to prevents a clean upgrade, how > will this be notified? We send flag day notices to this list. There is no guarantee that we won't miss something, of course. Again, this is not a product. You didn't pay for it, and it doesn't have a warranty. If that's a problem for you, then presumably you should contact Joyent Sales to see about buying SDC, or a third-party service provider willing to supply you with a warranty. The same would be true of any other non-product you can download on the Internet; e.g., CentOS. The model isn't novel. ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
