[syslinux] MEMDISK bug in Syslinux 3.10

[Peter Jones]

On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 10:33 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Bernd Blaauw wrote:
> > 
> > I tested only 3.10final. After that I detected the bug by accident.
> > It's absolutely not the case of 'test interim release, wait with signup 
> > until final released'.
> > 
> > As I'm no programmer (except for some ancient DOS batchfile scripting), 
> > I'll stick to Memdisk 3.09 instead of (re)compiling Memdisk.
> > After a next prerelease sometime has been published I'll update the 
> > Memdisk binary that I have :)
> > 
> 
> I know.  I'm a bit upset because I did *21* prereleases of 3.10 trying 
> to get people's feedback before the release.

I know it wouldn't help this particular case, but it would be nice to
institute a policy such that:

1) the tree isn't considered ok for release until that exact tree has
been available for testing for some fixed (and announced/posted on the
website/etc) amount of time, say 2 days or so.  I know I didn't get a
chance to test -21 this time until right as you shipped final, and I
suspect I'm not the _only_ one who has trouble keeping up during the
last moments of "I'd like to ship it soon" panic.

2) the last candidate is what ships, rather than the last candidate plus
whatever fixes happen.

That is, instead of "ok, so once this bug is fixed it's safe to ship",
making that bugfix the criteria for another release candidate, at which
time the clock resets.  This seems to happen for the second half of the
release pairs, but not the first.  Is that just my impression?

(I realize that in the case of 3.08 I was a contributor to this problem,
and that I should communicate with you more before our releases rather
than noticing that you're about to do a release and then trying to
quickly synchronize our time lines.  I'm sorry about that, and I'll try
to do better.)

> This is what I'm going to do:
> 
> - I don't believe in sitting on bug fixes, so I'll push this fix out as 
> 3.11-pre1.  If nothing else has accumulated in the next few days, it'll 
> be 3.11, hence confirming the tradition of syslinux releases in pairs :(

Fine.

> - I'll set up a syslinux-announce mailing list for syslinux release and 
> prerelease announcements.

That's be good.
-- 
        Peter