FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On 17 January 2012 16:48, Freddie Cash <fjwcash at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Igor Mozolevsky <igor at hybrid-lab.co.uk> wrote:
>> Actually, I don't think it's cash that's the problem. I think it is
>> more to do with the lack of common goal: the way that releases are
>> perceived, at least by me, are that a bunch of people "play" in
>> current then at some point someone decides to take a "cut" of the
>> current branch and call it a release then work toward making that
>> "release" passable as stable. To illustrate that, I cannot find
>> anywhere on the .org website what core@ see the desirable features of
>> 10.0 to be, or what the committers are working toward.
>
> That would be because, with the multi-year debacle that 5.0-RELEASE
> became while they worked on the "features list for 5.0" (primarily
> SMPng), the FreeBSD Project has moved away from features-based
> releases and to time-based releases (although the exact timelines are
> not carved in stone).
>
> You won't find a list of features for the next release of FreeBSD.
> You'll just find a list of things that people are working on that may
> or may not be ready in time for the next release.
>
> The development is much closer to Ubuntu (release whatever is ready
> every 6 months) than to Debian (release everything when it's ready,
> even if it takes 2, 3, 4+ years to make it ready, while the current
> release grows stale).


And this is the ridiculous "bazaar" situation that I was criticising.
In contrast to Ubuntu, or other distribution on top of Linux, FreeBSD
is a "whole" system. Even Ubuntu and such, take a "collection" of
projects that have been developed with certain measurable goals. Yes,
Ubuntu appears to be date-oriented distribution, but the software that
Ubuntu incorporate into their releases is feature- and goal- oriented.
FreeBSD, it seems, as I have pointed out, have no measurable goals
within the project itself other than "whatever looks like it has a
potential to work on date X" is going to be in our release. How can
this be even considered to be serious?.. No serious
manufacturer/producer says "throw things in a mix and we'll stick to
whatever passes as passable by date X"...


--
Igor M. :-)