Re: [Axiom-developer] Problem building SIlver Axiom on Gentoo Linux

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> So patches get collected and the Gold copy is built/tested/ported
> every 2 months or so.

No problem. But we should also start to think about freezing the 
"next-release-gold", call it "GoldAxiomVersion-x.y-ReleaseCandidate", 
make it available publicly and post to the mailing list that everyone 
should test it on his/her system to find problems. If there is no 
problem reported anymore, Tim could turn the release-candidate into a 
true Gold-release.

That process would share the workload of Tim and prevent things that 
happened once with releasing a broken Gold system.

> Gold gets released every couple months. Silver can do a simple
>   diff -r --brief Gold Silver
> to see exact changes.

That is too late. People want to see the hottest edge.

next-release-gold == silver/trunk

I am very much in favour of that. And I thought that was the idea from 
the beginning---mirror the hottest edge on sourceforge.net.

> If I took on the responsibility of doing immediate patches to 
> Silver that would completely negate the whole "update rate"
> balance discussion. You can't just throw a patch at a system.
> You have to check it. That takes time even for simple patches.
> For instance, I have a simple fix to the Makefiles for libXpm
> that makes the system compile correctly on FC5. However, it
> breaks Redhat systems. So if I just applied the patch to Silver
> without testing some of the users would have broken code.

Tim, if someone is willingly not taking the Gold release, but decides 
for Silver==(all patches applied to the latest Gold release), s/he 
should know that things might be broken. But that is not a bug, it's a 
feature. People could help to figure out why the system doesn't build 
and could supply another patch to you. If they just see Gold and not the 
latest patches+bugfixes, people might find just bugs that are already 
fixed. It's a waste of time and might make people turn away from Axiom.

> There are things that only I can do

For example?

Ralf