Will 5.4 be an "Extended Life" release?

[Colin Percival]

Clifton Royston wrote:
>   In the next month or two I've got to upgrade a number of servers that
> are currently on an EOL'd version of 4-STABLE.  I foresee that I'll
> have very limited time to do full OS upgrades on these systems in the
> coming several years, so I want to make sure I bring them onto an
> extended-life branch.

My personal recommendation is to put them on FreeBSD 5.3 right now, and
to move up to 5.4 when it is released.  Minor version upgrades are really
easy in FreeBSD -- once I had downloaded the ISO image, it took me all of
five minutes to upgrade from FreeBSD 5.3 to 5.4-BETA1.  (I have detailed
instructions online on doing the 4.8->4.11 upgrade, and I'll put similar
instructions online about the 5.3->5.4 upgrade once 5.4 is released.)

>   If 5.4 is expected to be an extended-life branch, I would consider
> moving them up to 5.4 instead, to get a leap on current technology. 
> Has that decision been made yet?

No.  The decision will be made around a week after the release, when the
security team takes over the branch from the release engineering team.

That said, we're currently leaning towards not making 5.4 an extended
support branch -- but this will depend largely upon how many more releases
there are from the 5.x branch.  We are committed to providing extended
support for the last release from any major branch, so if you install 5.x
now and can perform minor-version upgrades (again, neither difficult nor
time consuming) then you can expect security support until at least the
second half of 2007.

Colin Percival