Re: Freeze is too early

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 15 Dec 1998, Michael Mathers wrote:
> What are you talking about?  With CVS (when it's working, that is),
> GNOME is essentially releasing CONTINUOUSLY!  Freezing is the ABSENCE of
> change..  >

No. Hackers use it from CVS - no one else does. And freezing is not the
absence of change. We are freezing the whole tree for maybe a week or two;
then an unstable version will be branched. It is just like the Linux
kernel and many other projects, with stable/unstable. Did you want Linus
to wait for all the 2.2 stuff to go in before releasing 2.0?
 
> 
> So, we'll basically be saying..  "Ya know, it's not bad.  Actually, it's
> rather decent despite a couple of(known)  quirks."  -- Hardly inspiring. 
> Particularly when 3-4 MONTHS at 0.99 could change that.  It's not
> correct to try and capitilize on the recent OSS hype and bugaboo.  It's
> correct to release good software and software that's READY.  >

We are freezing now, releasing soon, but we can also release in 3-4
months. In fact I hope we will.
 
> I could cite the UI as being the cause for dissatisfaction, but let's
> assume that it is because UI discussions are neverending.  However, if
> the real reason is because "no one has had time to write it", quite
> frankly, I'm amazed that you would dismiss the idea that the freeze is
> too soon so easily.  This certainly is not the only problems GNOME is
> having right now.  There are an unbelievable amount of
> compilation/installation problems.  Am I correct in reading that GNOME
> installation does not correctly identify if you have glibc (kernel
> threads) support installed?  Don't you think this is an issue that will
> affect ALOT of people (Linux systems)? 

No, because the point of the freeze is to fix compile issues like this,
and get it packaged in distributions so people don't have to compile.

> Albeit, someone like you or I
> could figure out the problem sooner or later and get GNOME 1.0 working. 
> But this is not really the only audience we are targetting now, are we? 
> How much irreparable damage will be caused by the myriad of users who
> just read about how great OSS/Linux/FreeBSD is and then decide to try it
> and are baffled/stumped/dissillusioned about GNOME v1.0?  It won't
> matter to me, I'll just wait until v1.1.  But how many others will? 

Less irreperable damage than if Gnome never matters at all because there
is never a release.

95% of developers want a freeze, therefore there will be a freeze. You can
still use CVS though, if you prefer.

Havoc