response 51 of 81:

Aug 11 01:48 UTC 2007

   Sorry Mike, you got that dead wrong.

   I'm thinking of whats best for Grex.  We're doing an upgrade, which is
good.  But since we're bad at timely upgrades, we'd be in the best position
to get to the most recent version.

   Two OpenBSD developers agree that this is the way to do it.  Sadly, Grex
staff doesn't "get" OpenBSD.  The board doesn't understand, and so can't
raise an objection.

   It's not about "alpha geek".  I don't give a shit about that.  I have
no idea how you'd ever measure it, any way.

   Cyklone, if I'm of the old mind-set, so be it.  But show me where one
can get six-packs of time, will ya?  If we had the staff of a few years
ago where we had 11 roots, we could do this upgrade, and then do another
later.  That would be great.

   Dan, you do an extremely good job of finding reasons not to do the
upgrade.  You have a future I think, in the legal profession should you
ever tire of computers.  That isn't meant as a jab.  To respond to your
*offical* release statement: at some point in September (or later) the
code is going to change from 4.2 to 4.2-current.  At that point we know
what 4.2-stable is.  Now, the "errata" that you speak of on November 1st
is all available in the CVS logs.  You know that as well as I do.  If you
subscribe to the CVS change logs you'll see things.  Bad stuff is
identifiable.  You have to know something about code, but its all there.
It would certainly be possible to add those if we deemed them important.

   But I'm not going to push any more.  Folks don't see what I'm saying
and I can't do any more than I have, so I consider that I've "lost" this,
and we'll upgrade, which is good, but be in the position of being
behind in about 2.5 months.  Oh well.

   Let us talk about two other points.

   Point one is that Provide has cut back hours that staff are there,
and might not be there at all on Sunday.  Did anyone call John A to
see if he'd be around such that perhaps he could reboot the box for
us if things get into a weird state?

   Point two is the question of wether telnetd will compile and
run right on 4.1.  It should, I think, but I'm not sure.  If there
are any parts of it that know about ipx packets that will have to
get changed as 4.2 no longer supports them.

   Point three (OK, I can't count) is that I don't have Picospan
ready yet.  I am quite busy at work trying to get systems ready
for the coming academic year, and I just found that my sole 4.1
box is dead.  So I'm trying to get more hardware together to 
make such a box, but I have limited time tonight so I'm not sure
I can get 4.1 up.  Picospan proper should be a breeze to compile,
taking about 1 minute to make.

response 53 of 81:

Aug 11 02:54 UTC 2007

   Thanks for that Glenda.  Assuming the little Dell you stole from the
cats works, we should have picospan for 4.1 tomorrow some time.

response 55 of 81:

Aug 11 02:55 UTC 2007

#53 slipped in.  Big thanks, Steve!

response 57 of 81:

Aug 11 14:47 UTC 2007

Re #54:  Fortunately, Picospan is not as mission-critical as it once was, 
since we have Fronttalk as a fallback.  It's not in a completely polished 
state, but I've had enough experience with it to know that it's pretty 
stable and is 90+% indistinguishable from Picospan.  So I agree with folks 
who say that we shouldn't let whether Picospan is ready or not affect the 
timing of the upgrade.

As to Grex's other custom software - I was pretty heavily involved with 
the upgrade to 3.8 and found Jan's Grexdoc CVS system to be invaluable.  I 
recommend sticking with it.

response 59 of 81:

Aug 13 00:02 UTC 2007

(It's now moot, since the upgrade is in progress, but I'm going to add my
comments anyway.

(We have the staff do an upgrade this weekend.  We may not have the staff to
do an upgrade in November. So how can ANYONE, _in good conscience_, argue for
a solution that DEPENDS upon having staff to do an upgrade in November?  The
procedure I've seen propounded is to upgrade to -beta now and to -stable when
it is released.  *IF* we have the staff available in November, they can
upgrade from -stable to -stable just as easily as from -beta to -stable.  If
we don't have the staff for an upgrade, we stay on -stable INSTEAD OF ON
-BETA.

(And yes, I'm shouting, 'cus some don't seem to be hearing.)

response 61 of 81:

Aug 13 04:03 UTC 2007

Yeah, I think we beat the time line by about 20 minutes.  :-)

response 63 of 81:

Aug 13 05:48 UTC 2007

Hurrah! we are up and running. neat.

response 65 of 81:

Aug 13 13:41 UTC 2007

 thanks much, Dan!

response 67 of 81:

Aug 13 14:41 UTC 2007

Nice work!

response 69 of 81:

Aug 13 17:02 UTC 2007

I just read this for the first time.  I don't see why it was the best
thing to start the discussion here on Friday, for an upgrade that was to
begin Saturday.

My other comment is that I've known Nick Holland for over 20 years,
since our college days at Michigan Tech.  He introduced me to M-Net,
which directly led to me getting a job in Ann Arbor.  Not that that
could possibly be valuable or interesting to anyone here...

response 71 of 81:

Aug 13 17:07 UTC 2007

I'd prefer a hat that says, ``when you can't get up off the floor.''  :-)

response 73 of 81:

Aug 16 23:30 UTC 2007

Are we going to have to do the same thing Dan did this past weekend to go to
4.2 in November?