Title? What title?

(I’m sure I’ll be making more posts on this topic, hence the “Part 1”.)

re@ is pushing back the 6.2 release schedule by about a month; this is mostly due to the fact that 6.1 took awhile to get out the door and we need some time to work out some issues. We still need to come up with a more detailed schedule, but code freeze is going to start on or around 25 August, and we should release in early October.

On the 6.1 front, we’ve issued on errata notice (for a problem with rc.d/jail), and we’re working on another errata notice covering some network bugs. I wrote up a draft for this over the weekend…half of the effort was looking up what the revisions were in CVS. As I’ve learned countless times before, the best way to understand something is to be forced to explain it to someone else.

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.