Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ?

Garrett Cooper yanegomi at gmail.com
Wed Jun 13 15:50:25 UTC 2012


On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 5:53 AM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 8:01:00 pm Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> hi,
>>
>> You don't need to change the FreeBSD culture. We'd love to do an 8.4
>> release. And an 8.5 release, and 8.6 release, etc. The problem is one
>> of resources and time, not of culture/desire.
>
> I disagree.  The pace of X.0 releases is a deliberate choice FreeBSD
> has made and directly impacts the number of "live" branches in existence.
> Given our developer base, we can't really support 3 branches concurrently
> (head + 2 stable like we have now with head, 9, and 8).  Having longer lived
> stable branches requires either increasing resources to support exising
> releases longer, or slowing the pace of X.0 releases (but more aggressively
> merging things from HEAD back).  The latter case, especially, is part of
> the culture and would be a choice we as a Project would have to make.

    The only way that this would really work is if there were
dedicated sustaining engineers working on actively backporting code,
testing it, committing it, etc as the current paradigm requires the
developer (or another stand-in developer in the event that the
original developer failed to MFC the code) to do the work (which is
sort of what the OP is doing in this case, and what I've seen a few
different groups do that don't run bleeding edge code). That concept
doesn't really exist today. Maybe this would be a good idea for
improving the longevity of release cycles and maybe that's what
ultimately needs to be done as it would reduce distractions on
developers actively churning away on {[CURRENT-1],}[CURRENT], and
maybe that's what should be proposed.
    As good as BSDi was from what I hear, that "business" model alone
won't probably work as many people take the support piece (companies
that just want the software and might develop/support apps/services on
top of it) and the longevity piece (companies that develop with/on the
software as a product) separately. They're typically (but not always)
mutually exclusive from what I've seen in my limited experience.
Thanks,
-Garrett


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