Lifetime of FreeBSD branches

[Scott Long]

Francisco Reyes wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2005, Scott Long wrote:
> 
>>> Is the goal to have a new major branch every 2 years?
>>
>>
>> Yes.  This will allow us to pace our major development projects much
>> better than we have in the past.
> 
> 
> Someone mentioned 5.X will be supported till 2007 (or at least that's 
> the plan). So will, in average, branches be supported 2 years after a 
> new one takes over?

Yes, that is the usual policy of the security team.  There will likely 
be other developers that push changes into the 5.x stream for some time
to come.

> 
> Sounds like a good strategy for most shops. I can imagine that for a big 
> shop with lots of machines it may be a bit agressive, but I am not one 
> of them. :-).. besides big shops likely have developed entire systems 
> around how to deploy the OS to many machines.

Yeah, and what I'm trying to do is smooth the bumps for the long term. 
The 4.x->5.x transition was simply a gigantic mess for users, and it was
largely a function of it being 4+ years in the making.

Scott