Re: [lwip-users] PPP driver from lwIP

[Kieran Mansley]

On Thu, 2011-05-05 at 16:56 -0400, Bill Auerbach wrote:
> Maybe you (lwIP developers) shouldn't use the term STABLE because not having
> it implies UNSTABLE which is far from the truth.  If no one used an RC
> because it's an RC, then the risk of problems in the STABLE release is much
> higher.  We've been shipping 1.4 in 4 products long before an RC was even
> released.  If I've done my homework (i.e. testing) then whatever is there is
> STABLE as far as I'm concerned because I don't find problems.  It's not like
> this is 1.0 - it's 1.4.  IMO the more of us who use the latest release (RC
> or not) the better for everyone, and the sooner we will have a more "stable"
> release.

I can see where you're coming from, but I'm not going to change the way
we label things.  The better solution would be to have a shorter release
cycle so that "STABLE" release doesn't lag the current code base by as
much.

For completeness:

STABLE is a snapshot from a time when we know the tree was in a good
state with no known major bugs.  We try to give some guarantee about
this and so people who really care about a fixed working code base can
choose that.

The CVS tip is not marked STABLE as we provide no guarantee about it
being in a usable state or things changing dramatically from day to day.
That doesn't mean that right now it is unstable, just that it is allowed
to be unstable if we need.

A release candidate has similar status to the STABLE snapshot (indeed it
will eventually become the STABLE snapshot).  It is guaranteed that
there will be no API changes between the release candidate and the final
release of that version, so anyone who has been tracking the previous
STABLE code base would be well advised to start upgrading to the release
candidate for the next version when it becomes available.  This will (i)
get them all the intervening bug fixes; (ii) mean they won't have any
difficult changes to track between the RC and the release; and (iii)
they help make sure that the final release is of high quality (and has
everything they need) by testing it.

I wouldn't advocate basing products on an intermediate lwIP version
(i.e. not STABLE, not a release candidate, between releases when we're
in the middle of developing features).  We do rely on some people using
lwIP from the current development tip however to report bugs and
problems so they can be fixed.

Kieran