[systemd-devel] What I think is really wrong with systemd

[Martin Pitt]

Thanks Colin for your reply!

Colin Guthrie [2015-09-16 11:30 +0100]:
> > Normally, you have a major version and a minor version. If the major
> > version changes, it is an alarm to do throught testing to see if
> > everything works wellon the new one. Minor changes are minor, so they
> > require less testing.
> 
> Minor, major etc., this doesn't matter. Even minor changes can introduce
> major bugs. The fact that someone arbitrarily decided "this is a minor
> change" doesn't make the change safe in any way. Testing of such key
> components should be the same regardless. Adopting such a scheme in a
> project like systemd serves no purpose but to create a fake illusion of
> "safeness".

I just want to emphasize this. We've seen the smallest bug fixes cause
trouble in totally unexpected corners. Major new features are actually
less risky, as nobody is relying on them yet. :-)

Especially on desktops/phones/customer devices etc. the software world
has pretty much moved from these "major new release every year"
towards a continous delivery of features and fixes, together with
continuous integration testing of those. The latter ensures that we
don't break stuff no matter how big the change is (in theory at least,
we all know practice..), and it tremendously helps to take pressure
off developers to cram their feature into next week's deadline for
feature freezes.

I think in the server world stable releases with bug-fix only
microreleases (backporting from trunk) are still much more common.
This environment is rightfully more conservative, but I daresay that
we'll see a shift towards continuous integration and delivery of new
features as well.

While systemd lives on both servers and clients, it's still being
developed rather fast, and I don't think splitting it up into "new and
shiny, but totally untested in the world out there" vs. "stable bug
fix only releases which are missing features people are asking for"
would make sense at this point.

TL;DR: Version numbers become more and more meaningless. :-)

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)