Re: Beginners using 1.3

Stephen Lee (sl14@crux1.cit.cornell.edu)
Wed, 21 Feb 1996 17:14:13 -0500


On Feb 19, 11:03am, Snow Cat wrote:
>
> Clayton O'Neill once wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, Robert of the smileys wrote:
> > > > Would be nice if at boot time 1.3 printed a message warning about
> > > > its experimental status.
> > >
> > > Good idea, just about everyone reads those messages as they scroll past
> > > to make sure everything is as it should be.
> >
> > This may be a bit draconian, but it should be trivial to make the kernel
> > wait for an affirmative input indicating the the person has read the
> > message that basically says "This is beta code and might (probably) won't
> > work the way you want. You've been warned". I'd make it possible to
> > override this behavior with a kernel parameter for those of us willing to
> > use beta kernels in production.
> >
>
> I don't think it's a good stratagy as it will force some people to avoid
> this delay screen rather than bugs. Then, if code is not tested by an
> average user, how can we have "stable" versions? How many people around are
> using XFree86 3.1.2<beta>?
>
> Besides locking up at boot is not good for unattended systems that are
> supposed to reboot after power off or crash.

Of course it should be able to be bypassed. Say a kernel command line
option

betakey=458739

which is a random number that changes with each release. Then people will
get the screen the first time they install a new beta kernel, and be able
to disable it in lilo.conf.

Stephen

-- 
Stephen Lee
Internet: sl14@cornell.edu