FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Status Update

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."

Who's "We"?

[mattrix2k]

The engineering team supports themselves? Slashdot editors support them? All slashdot readers support them?

OT, but I *have* to ask this

[arvindn]

What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?

Re:OT, but I *have* to ask this

[jhunsake]

There is no reason to do it. The submitter and the editors are just rude!

Re:OT, but I *have* to ask this

[moonbender]

But there is information given about him: he's a member of FreeBSD Release Engineering Team. If you've got a serious inquiry related to the postponed release date, he might be the guy to mail. And, of course, FreeBSD freaks probably can associate something with the name itself, they don't require additional information.

However, I'd agree that putting his email address there isn't incredibly helpful to anyone, because there are usually better places to mail inquiries to, like a mailing list.

Thats real smart

[Anonymous Coward]

post the guy's email on the front page of slashdot. gee, i wonder how much crap he'll get now.

A floppy?

[repetty]

"The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk."

It's 2003 and a sparkling new Unix OS is being held up by... a floppy?

I remember floppies... I used them back in the 80's and very early 90's.

I'm glad that they are sticking by their principles on this. I just wonder if they are principles worth sticking to.

--Richard

Re:neat

[t0ny]

"We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."

However, that doesnt stop us from making fun of a major For Profit software company for doing similiar things. This in no way makes us feel like hypocrits, strangely enough.

Funny reason

[Captain Rotundo]

I don't even have a floppy disk drive in my computers anymore. Why is making the file fit a floppy that important? They are pretty much obsolete at this point.

Re:Funny reason

[stratjakt]

Because everyone is not you.

There are a lot of headless 'nix based gateway boxes around with a floppy, and no CD-ROM.

I love the "i dont need it so therefore noone possibly could" attitude slashbots have.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess those situations don't involve threads or more than 1 CPU.

Re:BSD is cool

[oznet]

LOL. You think the only reason for running VMware is for Windows support?

As a consultant it is one of the most valuable tools I own. I can run any Linux, BSD, or Windows version I want. I keep a respository of clean installs which lets me instantly extract a clean system to test with. This lets me test installs, different system configurations, software I wouldn't normally install, etc. I can setup entire networking environments (including mixed OS's, Linux, BSD, Windows, etc.) for testing...

I could go on and on. I can't easily express how useful VMware is.