FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Mark Blackman]

On 26 Jan 2012, at 22:49, Mark Linimon wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 10:23:43PM +0000, Mark Blackman wrote:
>> 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."
> 
> That was our intention at one point.  Obviously we've not stuck to that.
> (IMHO doing releases quite that frequently is probably beyond what we can
> do with volunteer staffing, but I'm not on re@ so take it as you will.)
> 
> In any case, various people within the project have now absorbed the
> lesson that "10 months between releases is too long", and are trying to
> figure out what to do about it.

Indeed, I was just reviewing the last couple of years of release and the thing
that struck me was the number of BETAs and RCs for each point release.

I suspect poor old RE is putting too much work into BETAs and RCs for
point releases. 

- Mark