FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 1/16/12 11:28 PM, John Kozubik wrote:
> 
> Friends,
> 
> I was disappointed to see that 8.3-RELEASE is now slated to come out in
> March of 2012.  This will be ~13 months since 8.2-RELEASE and is typical
> of a trend towards longer gaps between minor releases.
> 
> I also see that undercutting the current release before wide deployment
> and maturity is continuing.  7.0 came (barely) after 6.3, which was bad
> enough, but not as bad as 8.0 arriving with 7.2, and now 9.0 with 8.2.
> 
> Finally, the culture of "that's fixed in CURRENT" or "we built those
> changes into (insert next major release)" continues to get worse.  It's
> difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating
> system by, and for, FreeBSD developers.
> 


Wholeheartedly agree.

I'm having an increasingly difficult time defending FreeBSD in our
company against the advances of debian kfree which is much easier to
maintain.
Can we get back to the 4.x release style and, hopefully, see some 9.7,
9.8... ?

Check this PR I opened some months ago:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=161123&cat=kern

It was planned for 9.0-RELEASE, there is no mention of 8.x
That's just the kind of problem John raises here.


I can't keep on defending FreeBSD when the minor fix to a major bug
isn't backported, and only makes it to the next major version, 4 or 5
months from now.