4.x era

Adrian Chadd adrian at freebsd.org
Sun Sep 11 16:56:54 UTC 2011


I've heard this many times, and here's my (paraphrased) stock response:

People remember FreeBSD 4.x fondly. They likely don't remember 3.x
fondly. They remember 2.x fondly - because it was rock stable for a
lot of users. Then 3.x came along, with (new!) softupdates, and VM
changes, and some other stuff I was too young to understand. It was
stable for me, but unstable for a lot of much more serious and larger
users. 4.x was when that matured.

People see 8.x as stable. Not in all situations, but in a lot of them.
9.x may not be as stable for some, but there's a lot of good stuff
going into it. If the developers play their cards right, 9.x will be
the cycle where those bugs are shaken out and later 9.x releases will
be rock solid. The only way that (and hopefully, 10.0) is going to be
rock stable and be remembered like 4.x was remembered is if users
actively use it, report bugs and work with developers to fix it.

Rather than, you know, staying on FreeBSD-4.x :-)


Adrian


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