pkg_add for 5.2.1 no longer working...

[Mark Linimon]

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Steven Hartland wrote:

> From: "Darryl L. Miles" <darryl at netbauds.net>
> 
> > There must be 1000's of systems out there running 5.2.1 right now and 
> > these system (overnight) have already begun the rather steep slope into 
> > unmaintainability.

That's right.

Here's a longish, but more polite, way of saying the same thing :-)

5.2.1 was a special case: as has been pointed out, a 'new technology'
release.  5.3 is the first stable release on 5.X.  5.2.1 was always
intended to have a short support life.  In fact, it was intended to
have a short development life, as well, but that failed due to it
winding up with too many features in it.

To fix this, the way FreeBSD does releases is now going to be completely
changed: each .0 release will be done at around 18 months after the
previous .0 release (instead of 3+ years); each .1 release will follow
it after 4 months.  The shorter cycles are intended to decrease the
feature drift between major release numbers that was the bane of the
5.X development cycle, and thus encourage users to track the releases
more closely (i.e. we are hoping most users will upgrade by either the
.1 or .2 release).

The 5.3 release cycle was extended by many weeks to try to get us from
where 5.2.1 was (not yet ready for production) to 5.3 (ready for
production).  The QA effort leading to 5.3 was really intense to say
the least.  Now what's in 5.2.1 has drifted way behind 5.3 and we
really need users to move to 5.3 to get as much testing done on the
work that has gone into making it solid.  There are some regressions
in 5.3 but not many and from wearing my bugmeister hat it seems that
there is real developer interest in fixing these.  But on the other
hand there were hundreds of bugs fixed during the 5.2.1->5.3 transition.

So hopefully the short support cycle you've experienced for 5.2.1
will be a one-time occurrence for something so late in a major
release cycle.  In the future it should only be true for .0 releases.

In truth there were a lot of users who went to 5.X (X < 3) who
probably should not have.  FreeBSD's mistake was to let the feature
set drift so much from 4.X to 5.X that some users felt compelled to
to get features they needed.  The whole intent of shortening the major
release cycles is to prevent this very problem in the future.

> > Free BSD's policy seems to read that once a new mainline release comes 
> > out, users now have to start building their own binary ports for their 
> > old version of Free BSD.

That's only true for cases where a new -STABLE branch is created, such
as happened with 5.3, where all packages had to be rebuilt because the
shared library bumps happened just before 5.3-RELEASE.  We've learned
from that lesson, as well, and intend to do the bumps much, much,
earlier in each major release cycle.

But the key is your use of 'mainline release': 5.2.1 was never intended
to be a 'mainline release', it was always a 'technology preview'.  The
previous 'mainline release' is really 4.11 and it still has packages
available for it and will continue to in the medium-term.

mcl