FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Daniel Gerzo]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:54:44 -0800, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2012, at 2:44 AM, Robert Watson wrote:
>>
>> ... perhaps what is really called for is breaking out our .0 release 
>> engineering entirely from .x engineering, with freebsd-update being in 
>> the latter.
>
> This is a great idea!
>
> In particular, it would allow more people to be involved.

I like this idea too.

In a summary to this thread, I'd say that people would love to see:

- more regular minor releases, e.g. 8.3, 8.4 say every 4 months (3x per 
year)
- have max. 2 -STABLE branches under support at any given time (once a 
new -STABLE is created, EOL the oldest supported branch; in a result we 
would release major version a bit less often. However 5 years between 
mayor releases is too much and that would only stagnate the development 
and make switching between mayor releases much more difficult)
- make X.Y.Z releases more common or issue Errata notices for existing 
minor releases more often. I can easily imagine us fixing much more bugs 
by Errata notices than we do now. How much work is  behind issuing an 
errata notice?
- an idea from this thread that I liked is to allow people to 
cherry-pick the patch level (-pX) which would be great if we managed to 
release more errata notices.

-- 
Kind regards
   Daniel