capabilities of forthcoming group changes

[David Miller]

On 6/30/2003 11:22 AM -0500, Rob Browning wrote:

> David Miller <justdave at syndicomm.com> writes:
>
>> Yes.
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> Yes.  And the context you give is exactly what it was designed for. :)
>>
>> It's already implemented in 2.17.3 and up.
>
> Very nice.  So is 2.17.3 at a stage where it would be even remotely
> sane to consider using as long as we're willing to accept a bit of
> instability?  I'm not quite familiar enough with the bugzilla
> development process/cycle yet to be able to estimate that myself.
>
> Thanks much.

Re-posting from a message to the mozilla-webtools list a couple days ago:

When we call it stable, what that actually means is the code for it is
living on a branch, which gets ONLY security fixes and low-risk high-impact
bugfixes, and has also had a month or so of "cooling off" time on the
branch prior to release without getting new features or high-risk bugfixes
checked in.

In terms of behaving well on a production system, the 2.17.x development
releases are "generally" well-behaved...  however, they haven't had a
cooling off period, so there may be unknown issues lurking around
somewhere.  If the release you're looking at has been out for a month or
so, usually you can ask around and people will be able to tell you if it's
safe for production or not.  In hindsight, 2.17.1 was generally safe
(except we've fixed security bugs since then).  2.17.3 had a problem
sending mail when people uploaded new attachments (which was the only major
issue with 2.17.3 that I knew of).  2.17.4 seems to be pretty safe again so
far (we've had it running on an internal site [Bugscape] at Netscape for a
couple months with no real issues).

The other major difference between a "stable" release and a development
release is that if a major issue IS found in a development release then you
may have to pick up new features as well in order to get the bugfix for it.
Whereas with the "stable" releases, if a *major* problem is found, normally
you can get a new release with *only* the fix to that problem in it.  This
of course all depends on how severe the error is.  If it's high-risk to fix
or there's an easy workaround, it likely won't be fixed on the stable
branch.

-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/