not a good day for a beta

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@ebuilt.com>]

Sorry, but connections to apache.org are not working,
and a bunch of us don't even have network access today.
Let's make sure that the CVS HEAD works first before
tagging it as a beta.

....Roy

RE: not a good day for a beta

["William A. Rowe, Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net>]

+1 ... I firmly believe we should work together to make that date
happen, not because a marketing guru tells us to, but because we
want to excite some inertia :-)

I'll get some patches in for the bugs in Announcement over the next
few days.  I would also like to see beta 1 actually run on a simple
little Win9x machine, but I'm afraid some of that I need to delegate
to FirstBill, if I can.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rbb@covalent.net [mailto:rbb@covalent.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 8:47 PM
> To: new-httpd@apache.org
> Subject: Re: not a good day for a beta
> 
> 
> 
> Roy, you responded too quickly.  :-)
> 
> While running, I decided that we have always said Apache will 
> be released
> when it is ready, and not before.  That means when the 
> software is ready,
> and when the group is ready.  We have had one group member 
> say he doesn't
> think we are ready, so we are holding the beta.
> 
> Let's aim for rolling the beta on Tuesday Dec 26.
> 
> 
> Ryan
> 
> ______________________________________________________________
> _________________
> Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
> 406 29th St.
> San Francisco, CA 94131
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
> 
> 

Re: not a good day for a beta

[rb...@covalent.net]

> While running, I decided that we have always said Apache will be released
> when it is ready, and not before.  That means when the software is ready,
> and when the group is ready.  We have had one group member say he doesn't
> think we are ready, so we are holding the beta.
> 
> Let's aim for rolling the beta on Tuesday Dec 26.

I should point out that that goal assumes that the version on locus is
moved to the real server soon-ish.  I wish I could say that I have a
production server running HEAD, but I don't.  I have a home machine that
gets no traffice, because it can only be accessed by an IP address, and it
has almost no content.  :-(

Ryan

_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
406 29th St.
San Francisco, CA 94131
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: not a good day for a beta

[rb...@covalent.net]

Roy, you responded too quickly.  :-)

While running, I decided that we have always said Apache will be released
when it is ready, and not before.  That means when the software is ready,
and when the group is ready.  We have had one group member say he doesn't
think we are ready, so we are holding the beta.

Let's aim for rolling the beta on Tuesday Dec 26.


Ryan

_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
406 29th St.
San Francisco, CA 94131
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: not a good day for a beta

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@ebuilt.com>]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 06:13:55PM -0800, rbb@covalent.net wrote:
> 
> Should I assume this was sent much earlier today?  It came with a bunch of
> other messages about locus not being available.  Roy, did you just send
> this, or are you okay with the beta going ahead?

I sent it out earlier, but the point is that I don't think it makes
sense to tag an untested tree as a beta release, and I have serious
reservations that the current software is ready for a production
environment.  It may be, but I'd like to see it run on our own servers
first.  That doesn't mean see if it compiles and see if it installs
and see if it serves a few files -- it means running it under load
and making sure the memory leaks aren't too bad and that the server
doesn't crash after a few hours of real traffic.

I cannot emphasize enough that the only production machine that I know
about that is running something like HEAD is apache.org, and it spent
most of the afternoon in a comatose state.  That is probably unrelated
to the server on the high port, but shouldn't we at least check first?

Actually, I should be more forceful about this comment....

   Calling this thing a beta just because somebody decided that this
   week was a good week to announce a beta is no better than having
   a marketing department determine when our software is ready for
   release.

My gut says it isn't ready.  I want at least three people to say that
it is running in a production environment before the release.  I think
it makes more sense to do that testing on HEAD first, before it gets
tagged as beta 1.

This is a byproduct of what I have been requesting ever since 1.1
started with this lame "alpha" and "beta" distinction.  We should
be just numbering the releases as 2.0.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, ... and
simply adding the label "alpha" or "beta" to the name of the
tarball based on the amount of testing and confidence in that
specific release -- then we could tag the tree whenever the whole
thing was buildable.  *shrug*

Or maybe I just haven't had enough sleep today.  I just have a hard
time believing that anyone can be confident of what is in HEAD when
nobody has seen a machine run with it without crashing.  That sucks.

And what is really frustrating for me is that I no longer have
access to any production machines for testing.

....Roy

Re: not a good day for a beta

[rb...@covalent.net]

BTW, I am sure that CVS HEAD does work.  I have been serving pages with it
all day during my tests, and it has been working overnight on locus (back
up now, after to problems earlier).  Plus, others have tested HEAD.  We
are rolling the beta, not releasing it.  If this has problems, we have two
days to scream before we actually release.

I kind of need an answer, do I roll in a half-hour or not?  I want to, but
I don't want to upset anybody or overstep my bounds.

Ryan

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000 rbb@covalent.net wrote:

> 
> Should I assume this was sent much earlier today?  It came with a bunch of
> other messages about locus not being available.  Roy, did you just send
> this, or are you okay with the beta going ahead?
> 
> Ryan
> 
> On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, but connections to apache.org are not working,
> > and a bunch of us don't even have network access today.
> > Let's make sure that the CVS HEAD works first before
> > tagging it as a beta.
> > 
> > ....Roy
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________________________________________
> Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
> 406 29th St.
> San Francisco, CA 94131
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 


_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
406 29th St.
San Francisco, CA 94131
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: not a good day for a beta

[rb...@covalent.net]

Should I assume this was sent much earlier today?  It came with a bunch of
other messages about locus not being available.  Roy, did you just send
this, or are you okay with the beta going ahead?

Ryan

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> Sorry, but connections to apache.org are not working,
> and a bunch of us don't even have network access today.
> Let's make sure that the CVS HEAD works first before
> tagging it as a beta.
> 
> ....Roy
> 
> 


_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom                        	rbb@apache.org
406 29th St.
San Francisco, CA 94131
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------