Will 5.4 be an "Extended Life" release?

[Steve Ames]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brett Glass" <brett at lariat.org>
> At 09:22 PM 4/17/2005, Colin Percival wrote:
>
> >Unless someone wants to step forward with an offer to pay the
> >salaries of the release engineering team for a few months,
>
> The same way they're being paid for their work on other
> releases? ;-)

We couldn't afford it :)

> >Eh?  If the important part is the security fixes, why not just
> >install 4.11 and then apply the security fixes?
>
> That's fine for awhile, but there will soon be enough
> that this will be painful. And it may be a good idea to
> produce a release containing other code that's been backported
> from 5.x and 6.x.

Nothing stops someone other than the normal RE team from rolling something
release-esque (like a 4.X snapshot) and requesting that it be made available
for download on the FreeBSD sites.... or rolling your own release for
internal use. The RE team is already pretty booked for 5.X releases and,
possibly, the 6.0 release this year. I would really prefer to keep them on
that rather than delaying any of this for a 4.X release. That said a
4.11-20050501 (or thereabouts) snapshot/mini-release would probably keep
most people pretty happy while they move forward to 5.X.

Lastly... 5.3 has been working brilliantly for me on every system I
installed it on. 5.4 is looking even better. Any 4.X snapshot should be
considered a stopgap measure until you have time/resources to move onward to
5.4.

-Steve