FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Mark Blackman]

On 26 Jan 2012, at 18:22, John Baldwin wrote:

> On Thursday, January 26, 2012 11:49:22 am Mark Blackman wrote:
>> a) who is "the project" in this case
>> and
>> b) what does it take for a release to be a release?
> 
> I'll answer the two together.  The project is the entity that "owns"
> freebsd.org and a release is not a release unless it is present on
> ftp.freebsd.org and has a signed announcement e-mail with hashes, etc.
> on the freebsd-announce@ mailing list.  Without those things there is
> no reason for a user to believe that a particular set of bits is a
> legitimate FreeBSD release.  Additionally, a release should be available
> via the appropriate tags in the CVS and SVN repositories available from
> freebsd.org machines.

Thanks. I wonder who that "entity" is? Everyone with a commit bit,
or perhaps just the RE team? Anyway, it's not very important in this
context.

I also tracked this down, but might be out of date.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/release-proc.html

"New releases of FreeBSD are released from the -STABLE branch at approximately four month intervals."

To be honest, I'm sure we all agree this sort of discussion is not useful on hackers 
and obviously at some point needs to turn into work rather than points of view. Mostly it just
boils down, "lets see if we can do -STABLE point releases a bit more frequently".

- Mark