[fbsd] HEADS UP: FreeBSD 5.3, 5.4, 6.0 EoLs coming soon

[Mark Linimon]

On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 09:59:10AM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote:
> For anyone who really wishes to stick to FreeBSD 4.x for performance,  
> we should refer them to dragonflybsd, which seems to be taking this  
> approach.  It was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 and seems to pretty modern  
> in userland.

DragonFly has made substantial rewrites/changes since the fork from FreeBSD.
I think to assume that there are no regressions in either stability, speed,
or support may be naive.

Their changes may or may not be improvements, but it doesn't necessarily
mean that moving will be painless (note: they no longer use ports, and
instead use pkgsrc, so users who are migrating are going to have some work
to do).  As always, individual users considering migration will have to do
extensive testing to see which one best works for them.

Therefore, I would rather not see us make the recommendation "use DragonFly".
I would rather see people concentrate on making 6.X have better stability,
features, and performance.

After all, the early releases of 4.X were (from what I've heard) somewhat
rough in those areas, as well.

As for the related idea of dropping support for 5.X, the current secteam
support schedule shows 5.3 and 5.4 support ending October 31st.  (Hopefully
everyone has already moved off 5.3 long ago).  This leaves only 5.5 which
is shown as having secteam support until May 31, 2008.

(Everyone will concede that 5.X was an, um, "transitional period" and/or
"learning experience".)

If any users are interested are still preferring 5.5 to 6.1 and the upcoming
6.2, we should probably try to find that out before we devote a lot of
developer resources to supporting it ...

mcl