[freetds] Release engineering

Eivind Eklund eivind at FreeBSD.org
Wed Oct 15 14:51:06 EDT 2003


I like FreeTDS, and I'm grateful that somebody take the time to
implement this important component.  However:

Please, please, *please* follow the common rules of good release
engineering (in descending order of importance - two orders of magnitude
less important per step ;-)

(A) (Priority 100) A release is STATIC.  You NEVER EVER change the
    contents of a release after the fact, such as replacing the
    freetds-0.61.tgz archive with a DIFFERENT ARCHIVE containing
    freetds-0.61.2.  This breaks everybody that has a system in place
    for using the tarballs - and I know of at least eight public open
    source systems that do this, as well as a bunch of proprietary systems.

(B) (Priority 1) Release engineering needs to include procedures to
    make sure that the documentation in the release is up to date.
    FreeTDS 0.61.2 refers to itself as FreeTDS 0.61.1.

(C) (Priority 0.01) It'd be nice if the archive name followed the normal
    convention for naming - .tar.gz for tar and gzip, rather than .tgz.

Eivind.


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