Droso

The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed.  Until 8.0 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues.  For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.

As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports freeze ahead of the release of 8.0.  To ensure that the tree is kept in a stable condition, we do need to have more discipline about the feature freeze we are currently using.  To achieve this, I have added a new tag to the commit log Feature safe: which needs to be set to yes explicitly for each commit.  While this is is tedious, it does mean that commits will be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr.  Portmgr is still working on a written set of rules for what is and isn’t allowed during a feature freeze, so please use common sense for now, and try to err on the side of caution and contact portmgr when in any doubt.  Sweeping commits touching a large number of ports, shared library updates affect more than a trivial number of ports, you get the picture; anything that would require a rebuild of more than a trivial amount of ports is not allowed without prior approval from portmgr.  With the release only a few weeks off, we cannot afford any major mishaps, so be conservative.

The feature freeze is enforced from right now and current plan is to tag the tree after RC1 is released.  There will be a short freeze while the tag is processed, and after that we will proceed with the ports slush as usual.

Please consider your commits in this light and help make this experiment a success so we can avoid long freezes for future releases.

Earlier today, Ken Smith bumped the version of the HEAD sources to 9.0.  I have just modified the scripts to make INDEX-8 based on RELENG_8 and add support for INDEX-9 based on HEAD.  They are available for ‘make fetchindex’ now.  Mark Linimon is working on adding 9 to the pointyhat scripts, so expect the first 9-current packages to be available later this week.

Packages for the release of 8.0 have been built for i386 and amd64, with a few days to go for sparc64.  They are currently not available on the mirrors yet, but will be included on the BETA3 cd sets.  Please give them as much testing as you can.  With the first iterations of the package sets already finished, we are currently in a soft feature freeze, and if no major changes appear, we do expect to keep the freeze very short.  Although the exact date is dependent on how the release progress in general progresses, it is currently expected to start at September 14 and last for two weeks.  Please don’t hesitate to contact portmgr@ if you have any questions or doubts whether a given change would be too big for the feature freeze.

Below is the tentative schedule for the ports freeze in preparation for 8.0-RELEASE. If any major delays occur in the overall release schedule, the dates may be postponed, but please start preparing to have your changed committed to the tree before August 17 to ensure they are included in the release. Also, portmgr kindly asks anyone who has anything major lined up to already from today start mailing portmgr about these so we know what to expect and not be surprised by any major fallout that might extend the short freeze we have planned.

August 17: ports tree is frozen and package build begin
August 24: ports tree is thawed and final package builds begin
August 31: FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is released and ports tree is unfrozen