FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

Garrett Cooper yanegomi at gmail.com
Tue Jan 17 00:06:46 UTC 2012


On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 3:32 PM, William Bentley <William at futurecis.com> wrote:
> I also echo John's sentiments here. Very excellent points made here.
> Thank you for voicing your opinion. I was beginning to think I was the
> only one who felt this way.
>
> I also have several FreeBSD installations spread across different
> development/production systems and it is not feasible to always upgrade
> to the latest and greatest. Part of why FreeBSD is difficult to adopt
> into more of the commercial/government sectors is because of this fast
> paced release cycle and most of the important patches/fixes are not
> backported far enough. This is why most of my customers decide to use
> Solaris or RedHat and not FreeBSD. (Not looking to start a flame war
> about the OS choice/etc just pointing out the Release cycle model). I
> would love to push FreeBSD harder but it is becoming increasingly
> difficult as of late.
>
> We seem to have lost our way around the release of FreeBSD 7. I am all
> in favor of new features but not at the risk of stability and proper
> life cycle management.
>
> Are me and John the only people that feel this way or are we among the
> minority?

    You aren't. There are other people like Devin Teske's group that
feel the same (they're upgrading from 4.x to 8.2! Brave man.. and
godspeed to him), along with some development organizations that
depend on long release cycles (IronPort, Isilon, etc).
    That being said. More people, more likelihood to succeed with what
you need, like julian@ suggests. I like long release cycles too for
stuff that I find critical and "in production", like my router. My
fileserver is a slightly different story, but I just got off the
CURRENT bandwagon off on to the 9-STABLE bandwagon :).
Cheers,
-Garrett


More information about the freebsd-hackers mailing list