Title? What title?

Played around a little bit with some old Makefile infrastructure to create a doc ISO…basically an ISO with various renderings (e.g. PDF, HTML) of the entire doc tree, or at least as much as will build. I wanted to be able to do this so I could have an off-line rendering of the doc tree, but we could theoretically build an doc CDROM to go with the rest of the distribution as well. This stuff has been sitting in the tree for (egads!) four years; not clear if anybody except me ever exercised it.

I was a little bit surprised this still (basically) worked, after I went and installed the chinese/docproj port so that the Simplified Chinese documents could build (well, technically this was just needed for PDF generation).

We shipped it.

It’s kind of weird how the whole team does all this work for weeks/months, and in the end it all comes down to a bunch of very hurried wordsmithing of a release announcement, a bunch of CVS commits to the Web sites, and a Web site rebuild. (Yeah, I know that’s just one “end”, the security-team probably doesn’t see it that way because they’ll get to take ownership of the RELENG_5_5 branch in a few weeks.)

In any case, many thanks to the rest of the FreeBSD community for helping to pull yet another release together.

I guess this is the latest in a string of “I don’t know about this blog thing but I’ll give it a try anyways” posts.

Now that I’ve just rejoined the release engineering team, I’m wondering if saying something about RE activities might be somewhat useful.  Of course this all comes at a time when our next pending release (5.5) is on the launchpad, so I’m not sure what there is to say about it.  (We’re waiting for some final details before sending the announcement out, but the bits are finalized, absent some huge catastrophe.)

We really need to write a new release announcement from scratch. We’ve been using basically the same text since around 4.2-RELEASE, probably much longer than that. kensmith joked that maybe this should be a requirement for a dot-oh release…I think maybe this isn’t a bad idea.  And the time to write it is at the start of the release cycle, not at the end when we’re tired and rushing around to finish things up.