suggest renaming and extending the -CURRENT and -STABLE lines

[Ivan Voras]

Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 05:29:12PM +0200 I heard the voice of
> Ivan Voras, and lo! it spake thus:
>> And we'll find many other people on this newsgroup who do the same,
>> but not everyone's a kernel hacker, or even a decent programmer, so
>> it's kind of insignificant.
> 
> I'm not a kernel hacker, and I don't remember the last time I ran a
> production system on a release longer than it took to do a buildworld,
> going back to 2.1.x.  My workstation runs -CURRENT, though I rarely
> run -CURRENT on other production systems (rarely != never, but it is
> rare).

Unfortunately (for this developer-centric practice), the trend in large
and/or important production environments is - as seen in Linux (and
Solaris) - to severely limit major OS upgrades. Of course the existing
possibility to do is excellent, but more and more end-users, especially
big ones, are going with big Linux distributions that basically stay
frozen (except for security upgrades) for years. And this idea gets a +1
from me - productions releases that are expected to run for years should
be able to "just work" without upgrading to the "kernel of the week". To
do this, a stable anchor-point is required and that's what -RELEASEes
should be for. I think the fact that not all our -RELEASES are created
equal (some are "extended support" releases) should be more advertised
and explained.


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