Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD?

[Mark Linimon]

> One doesn't have to live at the bleeding edge with ports if one
> doesn't want to even when compiling.  One can live a day, a week,
> a month behind the bleeding edge and allow other to hit problems
> and report them.

To be pedantic, there's a lot of difference between reporting problems,
and supplying fixes.

Sometimes figuring out the fixes is beyond the capabilities of our
maintainers, of course.  People should feel free to ask for help on
the mailing lists or forums in those cases.

But our general problem won't be solved merely by tagging.  There
have to be people willing to test based only on whatever tree, or
branch, or whatever, has been tagged.  This is on reason why the tree
at release time is _somewhat_ more stable: we are asking people to
test, test, test.  (The fact that we slow down the rate of major changes
to the tree accounts for the rest.)

mcl