HEADS UP: Release schedule for 2006

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 10:41:49AM -0800, Gary Kline wrote:
> 	I didn't move until 5 until 5.2+; it was a major move.
> 	There were lots of things to get-right.  So maybe by
> 	6.5, 6 will be granite stable.

(Disclaimer: I am not on re@ but I do watch the bugs come in as one of
the bugmasters).

We completely redid the way we did release engineering between the 5.X
series and 6.X series to avoid ever inflicting that much pain again.

The jump from 5.2 to 5.3 was huge and we learned many things not to do.
The jump from 5.3 to 5.4 was pretty minor -- but so is the jump from
5.4 to 6.0.  The emphasis was on a smaller feature set and a much longer
(painfully long :-) ) period of QA.

The result in the PR database is that for 6.0 vs 5.4, although there
are a number of regressions (in particular, certain i386 hardware), the
number of entries is far, far, less than for the 5.2.1 to 5.3 transition.

So I would urge people to change their view of 6.0.  From what I can
tell it's one of our strongest releases.  It certainly must be the
strongest .0 release.

In any case, I don't believe there are going to be .5 and .6 releases
going forwards.  This will keep us, in the future, from spending so
much time on MFCs.

Some of this background is further detailed in an article I wrote:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/version-guide/past-schedules.html

I hope that people will find the information there useful.

And, if someone ever wants to write that 5.X vs 6.X vs 7.X feature list
comparison, now would be a good time :-)

mcl