Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ?

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 11:52:28 am Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On 13 June 2012 05:53, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> >> 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.
> 
> Right, but I don't think the freebsd project would really mind or
> change much if more people came on board to handle legacy releases and
> support them.
> 
> If you're a company that uses FreeBSD stable releases, please consider
> contributing engineering resources and/or donations to the Foundation
> to improve the support of said stable releases. :)

No, that doesn't actually work.  Having additional support on a stable
branch requires someone able to 1) commit changes to stable branches and
2) be able to cut newer releases from said branches (i.e. doing the work
of re@).  You cannot get that as an outside entity.  It requires buy-in
from the Project itself.

-- 
John Baldwin