[OpenAFS-devel] warnings fix

[Russ Allbery]

Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com> writes:

> So what happened you might ask?
>
> Well, up until Sep 2007 all of the work that had been done on the
> "features" branch for non-Windows platforms had been code cleanup.
> There was any new big "feature" to drive the release.  In fact, if you
> had been developing your "big new thing" tracking openafs-devel-1_5_x in
> those days you probably would have been very happy.  The code was known
> to be stable and could be used in production.
>
> Then when the 1.5.25 release was issued in 20 Sep 2007 with the Demand
> Attach File Server code the world changed.

I think that means, in retrospect, we should have released 1.6 then, right
before merging demand-attach.  Then at least all that code cleanup and
related work would have gotten into stable, and while the release wouldn't
have been particularly exciting, it would mean that people developing
against it would only have had to deal with the demand-attach differences,
not lots of niggling little differences from code cleanup.

This is one of the reasons why I really don't like waiting for Big Changes
to push a release of a large piece of software.  I think time-based
releases work better, or a release right *before* a major merge of a new
experimental feature.

Now, of course, with Git and Gerrit, we wouldn't have taken demand-attach
the way that we did in one large lump, and it hopefully would no longer
take two years to digest it while it was stalling new major releases.  But
I think we should still learn from that past experience.  I think it's
extremely rare for clients to think there are too many releases, and
certainly AFS is nowhere close to that point right now.  If there's some
reason why the master branch is about to become unstable, I think that's a
very good time to think about blessing it as the next stable so that we
have a resync point with everyone who needs to run stable.

> We cannot stress it enough.  Small incremental changes are much easier
> to review and incorporate than big ones.  You have made an incredible
> effort refactoring and breaking up the code base you are working with to
> ease our efforts.  We appreciate that.

I want to second this.  Your patches are great.  We're already starting to
work through them and it's lovely to look at each chunk in an
easily-digestable size.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>