This page documents the flag day and heads-up messages sent to the ON community.
Flag day messages are sent when action is required on the part of at least some of the recipients. Examples include:
- putbacks where a kernel-userland communication protocol changed, and both kernel and userland need to be updated synchronously. BFU does this automatically, so only people who install a subset of ON (using cap-eye Install or some other means) will usually need to pay attention;
- putbacks where the build structure has changed. Sometimes this is as simple as something that breaks incremental builds, but not a full build, but sometimes a valid putback can break a full build, and developers need to watch out;
- putbacks requiring a developer or build machine maintainer to update packages from another consolidation on the build machine, such as libxml2, before ON will continue to build or run. Sometimes the dependency is in the other direction, where another consolidation depends on less-than-Committed interfaces in ON, and will need to be updated before they will build or run.
- putbacks requiring an updated version of the build tools. Sometimes this can simply be remedied by including -t in NIGHTLY_OPTIONS, but in the case of changes to nightly itself, will require SUNWonbld to be reinstalled;
- putbacks requiring special care in resolving conflicts after BFUing archives containing the changes. These are much less frequent now after the introduction of acr.
Heads up messages are sent to potentially interested parties when a significant event happens in ON, but no action is required on the part of any recipient. Examples include:
- notices of project integrations, detailing contact information, bug categories, links to further information, and sometimes a small tutorial;
- notices that the gate is broken (completely, or for certain subsets of builds);
- notices of gate machine outages, gatekeeper vacations, and other administrivia.
Not all flag-days or heads-ups are documented, due to the fact that they're simply not always discovered in time to be useful, if at all. Requests for correction may always be sent to the gatekeepers.
In order to increase relevance, as well as page download speeds, the flag-days are grouped into five-build chunks per page.
on 2009/10/26 12:09