Upcoming release schedule - 8.4 ?

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 13 Jun 2012, at 19:27, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:

> 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.
> 

Jumping in.

I for one, as a fbsd admin on corporate servers ( read not commiter), would dearly like less releases but a more aggressive MFC approach.