fast rate of major FreeBSD releases to STABLE

[Craig Boston]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 10:24:15AM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > The recent ports freeze has also concerned me, this is the longest
> > ports freeze I have witnessed since I started using FreeBSD years ago
> > and its for a desktop element of the os, does it matter if servers
> > running FreeBSD have to remain on vulnerable versions of ports as a
> > result of this?
> 
> Now this is totally bogus. The freeze before the 6.0 release was VERY
> long and several have been longer than this one has been so far.

I think the complaint may be more a result of this being a deeper freeze
than normal.  When ports is frozen before a release, it is often still
possible to get things like security fixes and minor updates approved
and committed.  The only time it's completely frozen is during
branching, which typically doesn't take very long.

I don't know if portmgr@ has approved any commits during the xorg freeze
or not.  Even if so I suspect the "critical" bar may be higher this time
due to the need to manually merge changes into the git repository.

That said, it's a major undertaking and there are valid arguments on
both sides.  Hopefully it will be done soon (keep in mind this is still
a volunteer project!)

> ??? I should leave this to others, but in the past FreeBSD has received
> heavy criticism for taking too long between releases. I guess you just
> can't win. Yes, V5 development is pretty well at an end (though V5 was
> not one of FreeBSD's better releases and I never used it on production
> systems), but V6 support will continue for quite a while.

One thing to keep in mind is that with shorter releases, it's a lot
easier to move from one release to the next.  It was a Very Big Deal to
upgrade from 4.x to 5.x and required lots of pain and planning, mostly
because so much had changed.

Going from 5.x to 6.x was much easier -- for those upgrading from source
it wasn't much different than point releases on the 5.x line.

I recently upgraded a 6.x server to 7-CURRENT to test out zfs and again
it was just like cvsupping and building stable.  There's some library
version issues, but those should be resolved before the 7.0 release
happens.  It's still nowhere near the massive undertaking from 4 to 5.

> I am VERY sure that RE and the developers NEVER want to go through that
> again.

Nor the users ;)

> No one who has any experience is going to drop 7.0 on any critical
> system. I run it on one desktop and my laptop. I am NOT going to
> install 7.0 on my DNS servers or any other critical system.

I'm running -current on my home file server, which is fairly critical to
me, but then again I'm obsessive about backups, which helps :)

I don't think I'd be brave enough to try it on business-critical systems
though, which I suspect is your meaning.

Craig