Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ?

[John Kozubik]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012, Jason Hellenthal wrote:

>>> I am looking at the upcoming release schedule, and I only see 9.1
>>> listed - can anyone confirm or deny 8.4 ?
>>
>> Although I am not on re@, AFAIK the only schedule that is on the table
>> is the one for 9.1.
>>
>
> Release 8.3 (April 2012) has it really been 6 months yet!


We (rsync.net) are deploying our new ZFS based platform on FreeBSD.  This 
is a platform that needs to be live in just a few weeks.[1]

We only run release software.  Further, I don't think anyone will fault us 
for steering clear of 9.0-RELEASE.  9.1 is probably four months away.

So our choices are 8, which has no roadmap, and 9 which doesn't exist.

On the one hand, we've made this choice before, when we invested hundreds 
of thousands of dollars into equipment, code, training, etc. for 6.4. 
We've successfully amortized this investment over the past 4-5 years, but 
not without a lot of pain.  The past 24 months has been a lot of custom 
work, backporting drivers, etc.  We don't want to repeat this.

On the other hand, we're not going to debut a new platform, to customers 
all over the world, on 9.0.

So ... how about a kickstarter, since that's all the rage ?  What would a 
reasonable total be, donated to the FreeBSD foundation, that would ensure 
the maintenance of the 8.x branch for another 3 years (say, Dec 31, 2015) 
and out to (to pick an arbitrary number) 8.10 ?

Just a thought ...


[1] After years of evaluation and testing, spanning 6.x - 8.x.