FTP files for 5.2.1-Release

[Mark Linimon]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Murray Stokely wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 07:41:06PM -0600, Jeff Lofgren wrote:
> > I have noticed that the directories for 5.2.1 RELEASE are no longer on any
> > FreeBSD FTP server (including mirrors).
> > Was this intentional?  The web site still allows you to search for 5.2.1
> > ports and applications, and tries to link to the appropriate FTP files,
> > which don't exist.  (more frustrating is the loss of SYSINSTALL usability
> > and PKG_ADD -r)
> 
> Hi Jeff, each release of FreeBSD requires that the mirrors host over
> 10gigabytes of packages for i386 alone, along with base system and 4+
> architectures for each release.  We have very few mirrors that are
> capable of hosting 5.2.1, 4.11, 5.3, and 5.4 snapshots with package
> sets and multiple architectures for each.

Murray also failed to mention that support for 5.2.1 was intended to
be dropped quickly since it was a 'bleeding-edge' release to some
dregree.  The amount of changes and stabilization that went into
FreeBSD in the 5.2.1->5.3 QA cycle was quite large.  Because of this,
you can't (for instance) use most 5.3 packages on 5.2.1.  It's
simply infeasible for the ports team to keep a separate set of 5.2.1
build machines, so whatever packages you find are going to be quite
stale by now.

We encourage everyone to move away from 5.2.1 and onto 5.3 or 5.4.
The results of a quick survey of which systems we still receive PRs
from indicates that this has, to a large degree, already happened.

mcl