FreeBSD Eol's?

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Roman Neuhauser wrote:

> # colin.percival at wadham.ox.ac.uk / 2004-04-24 14:39:57 +0100:
> > At 14:22 24/04/2004, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > >4.8 passed its expiry date and was extended.  4.9 will probably be
> > >extended at a later date too.
> > 
> >   Looks like Kris got a bit confused here. :-)
> > 
> >   The idea behind the extended support branches is that *selected*
> > releases will be supported for at least 24 months; this allows us to
> > offer extended support to people who can't upgrade on a regular basis,
> > while keeping the number of supported branches to a manageable level.
> >   We haven't yet decided which future branches will qualify for
> > extended support, but it is quite unlikely that this set would include
> > FreeBSD 4.9.
> 
>     How are the extended-support branches chosen?

The plan is still in the works, but I suspect it will look something like
this: starting with the second or so release on a -STABLE branch, every
third or fourth release will be designated for extended support.  We don't
have the resources to make every release live forever, but we can invest
the resources we do have in keeping selected and particularly successful
releases going for an extended period of time.  That said, there are some
hard questions to answer: RELENG_3 eventually dropped out of support
because patching security vulnerabilities became difficult as a result of
changed APIs being required to fix the vulnerabilities.  For example,
substantial weaknesses were present in the ncurses version in RELENG_3,
and patching the vulnerabilities would have been very time consuming and
difficult.  In RELENG_4, we had an upgraded ncurses, but in RELENG_3 that
would have required modifying every consumer of ncurses as well (top,
systat, vi, ...).  I think we're better placed with our 4.x releases than
3.x because security has become much more of a focus for the writers of
utility libraries and common dependencies.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research