Subject: Re: I don't want to wait! <[email-masked]>

From: Ken Hornstein <[email-masked]>

>I have waiting for the new release for two and a half month now.
>And that is enough. The problem is not that I have to wait.
>The problem is that none of the people who know say something.
>[...]
>But I think that the core group could give us a timeframe when they know 
>that it will be delayed from the day they suggest.

I'd like to point out that there may be some things you don't realize; there
were lots of problems with sun-lamp crashing for a while which no doubt stifled
a lot of the release work.  These seems to be mostly resolved now.

>I want to hear now a 'two weeks from now or six (eight, twelve) weeks
>from now'. They are overdue, not to distribute a new system. They are
>overdue to tell us some new stuff about the delivery date.

I think "overdue" is a big strong ... remember this is all volunteer work, and
they have to eat as well ...

>I read most of the 'current' stuff and I see that there are some
>problems to solve.
>
>May be they should write a note each week. Something that say how the
>problems are comming in and how they are solved. 

Well, the more time the spend writing status reports, the less time they can
spend working on the release, eh? :-)

I'd like to reinterate what someone else wrote as well: the sources-changes
and netbsd-bugs lists are good to subscribe to if you're interested in seeing
what problems are happening or being resolved.

And that being said ....

I have to admit to feeling a little like a Microsoft salesman lately ... I
keep telling people "Hey, a new release of NetBSD is coming out soon, and it's
gonna be really great".  I _know_ it's great, because I'm running 1.0_BETA,
But this lack of a release is really killing general interest in NetBSD,
especially since 0.9 got removed nearly everywhere due to that nasty legal
business with USL (I think I found it on one FTP site in germany ...).  And
you can't get 1.0_BETA without first installing 0.9 (well, I believe there's
a upgrade path if you want to use FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 ... which isn't on many
FTP sites either).  So that means that unless you have a buddy who already has
NetBSD installed or you're _really_ into serious pain, you're SOL (And I'd
rather not write up a set of installation documents that begin "To install
NetBSD 1.0_BETA, you must first install FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 ..." :-) )

Of course, I'm sure I'm not saying anything that anyone else hasn't already
figured out.

I guess if I had a wish list, it would probably include a small statement from
the core team saying what the general status of the release is ... it would
really placate those of us who are out on the edge. :-)

--Ken