visibility of release process

[Skip Ford]

Ken Smith wrote:
> With the 7.0 release I tried giving just the URL
> of the primary site (ftp.freebsd.org) but that proved people don't just
> want easy - they're lazy.  For the most part they just clicked on that
> and didn't look around for a mirror.  Hence your observation about the
> difference in bandwidth when you're listed versus when you're not
> listed.

Any idea if most of those ISO downloaders are really installing a fresh
system or are just updating from a previous release by reinstalling?

It seems to me many more people could be using freebsd-update(8) so
the announcement really could focus on upgrades rather than fresh
installs.  I obviously like FreeBSD myself, but how many new users
who need to download ISOs really come on board with each new release?
The freebsd-update(8) portion of "Updating existing systems"
could be the main focus of the announcement, and the "Availability"
section and "updating existing systems from source" sections could
just contain a link pointing to the web site since (I believe) the number
of users needing those should be limited.  No FTP listing in the
announcement at all.

I guess freebsd-update(8) currently has some limitations that make it
not so cut-and-dry.  But I'm a little confused anyway at this point as
to what the long-term plans are.  There's a CVS repo, SVN repo which
appears to be the way things will be, a "projects" svn repo, a
"projects" p4 repo, cvs(1) in base, csup(1) in base which is still
being worked on even though there appears to be a slow migration to
svn, svn(1) is in ports, there's no SVN repo for the ports tree but
there is for src, freebsd-update(8) exists for binary upgrades which
seems to be the way of the future for a huge majority of end-users, and
yet the official mirrors are missing both the SVN src repo and binary
update files.  It seems to me the mirrors and release announcement are
behind the times by pointing to source upgrades and ISO downloads,
or maybe I'm just a little too early.  I hope core has a plan for
all of this. :)

-- 
Skip