What is a release?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Mark Atwood <fallenpegasus at gmail.com>:
> Speaking of which, the next cadence point release is going to be next
> Tuesday, the day after tomorrow, while I will literally be standing before
> the LF CII making the case for our work.   So, this is a really good time
> to be doing work that merits entries in the NEWS file.

You'll be happy to hear that I've been doing exactly that, then.

I've forward-ported eight recent bug fixes from Classic; the entries
are in the NEWS file.  Likely I'll get one or two more this evening.
It'd be more, but I have a vicious cold just now and aren't 100%.

Things to emphasize to LF: these are bugs we inherited from Classic,
and I'm able to focus on fixing them because we haven't introduced
*any* of our own.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.  (I just reviewed the issue
tracker to verify this.)

So from the LF's point of view, the case for our work is that we
have significantly hardened the code and reduced its bulk by over
50% while introducing zero new bugs.  Significant hardening can
be measured by the fact that since the fork we've seen three CVEs go
by that we dodged because we had already fixed the hole in question.

Nor should the effect of the documentation overhaul be ignored.  It
has gone from a horrible mess significantly out of sync with the codebase
to being pretty clean and usable.

Most difficult to see, but very important for the future: this codebase
is no longer a maintainance nightmare.  Shooting autoconf through the
head, bringing the code to SuSv2 conformance, ripping out autogen,  and
discarding all but a tiny lernel of the ISC library have *vastly*
reduced overall complexity and friction.  We can go forward from here
without constant fear that we're going to break something obscure
every time we touch it.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>