[9fans] Oil on the water

[steve_kilbane@cegelecproj.co.uk steve_kilbane@cegelecproj.co.uk]

On 22/09/98 22:28:53 rob wrote:

> The main obstacle to a release is pragmatic: the work of putting
> together a coherent package of hundreds of programs and the better
> part of a million lines of code is not something to be undertaken
> lightly.  There were several man-years of documentation work alone in
> the last distribution.  We don't relish going through all that again.
[shudder]

I wonder, would it be possible to have multiple levels of release?

Lucent would provide the first level of distribution, which would be for a
single, agreed-upon platform spec, with minimal documentation. This would
be somewhat similar to the ealy UNIX tapes.

The second level would be provided by Plan 9 users, rather than Lucent,
allowing the userbase to extend the basic distribution to something more
acceptable to today's persistence-challenged net: more docs, more drivers,
additional hardware platforms, better installation code, etc.

I'm taking a lot for granted from the readers of this list, of course. Just
thinking of ways in which the initial release process can be made less
demanding on the original developers.

steve