Where is FreeBSD going?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:57 AM -0500 1/7/04, Leo Bicknell wrote:
>Speaking with a user hat on, I'll comment on what I believe
>is the crux of the 5.x issue.

>The take away I see is that this was too big of a chunk.
>The next bite planned needs to be smaller.

I agree with this observation, but then it's easy to see that in
hindsight.  We started on some ambitious targets when 5.x started,
and at the time we believed we were going to have a lot more full-
time development resources than we ended up with.  That whole big
problem with the "dot.com bubble bursting".

I do think we need to tackle a somewhat smaller chunk of projects
for 6.0, so it won't take so long to get it done.  I also expect
we have a much more realistic idea of what our resources are than
we had in late 1999.

>You can't delay one year or two years in a production
>environment.

Actually, in a production environment you're more than happy to
delay a year or two.  You don't want constant churn.  You don't
want new API's and ABI's every year.

The problem for freebsd is that 4.0 was released in March of
2000, and that was advertised as a "stable" release.  5.0 was
released in January of 2003 -- and was explicitly *not* a
stable release.  We could stand to have a major stable release
every two years, or maybe even every three years, but this is
going to be more like four years.  That is too long.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu