Re: OpenLDAP 2.5 plans and community engagement

[David Magda <dmagda@ee.ryerson.ca>]

> On Aug 7, 2019, at 00:24, Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@symas.com> wrote:
> 
> --On Tuesday, August 06, 2019 9:27 PM -0400 David Magda <dmagda@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
>> You mention binary packages on the website:
>> 
>> 	http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/108.html
> 
> The FAQ explicitly states:
> 
> "Official releases are in source form only."  I don't know how that could be any clearer.

Yes, I’m sure all the people who I have seen come to this list running an older, distro-supplied RPM/Deb have read that, ignored it, and posted anyways thinking “surely they can’t be serious”. As an admin I know that all / most of the software in a distro is out-of-date, but there are not enough hours in the day to compile-from-source all the software that is used: that’s why distros were invented in the first place, to save everyone time.

> People who write the list are already provided the information on these options.  What would the project having yet another build of the same things provide?

Perhaps all of these people started providing these binaries because the project itself didn’t / doesn’t? Maybe all of those other efforts could be refocused to build binaries served from (say) repos.openldap.org. The infrastructure seems to already be present: perhaps it just needs to be centralized / concentrated?

>> So 2015 was quite product, but most of 2016-2017... not so much.
> 
> 2015 had a lot of serious bugs in its release, the releases were rushed, and the result of rushing was bad.  I don't think 2015 is a "good" example of how things should be done.

That is an argument for timed releases. The OpenBSD project is a good example: they release twice a year. If a feature cannot be made stable in time for one release, they either back it out or do not commit in the first place, and simply try to make it work for the following one. There is actually less pressure to force a feature (that may or may not be ready) in a particular release, because the next one will be along shortly. When releases are ad hoc, there is actually more pressure because people start thinking “if we don’t get it in this release, who knows when the next opportunity will be”.