Schedule for releases

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Wed, 22.12.2010 at 09:52:03 +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Erik Cederstrand <erik at cederstrand.dk> wrote:
> > Den 21/12/2010 kl. 23.28 skrev Robert Watson:
> > > Looking at 7.x, I'm struck by how much it has slowed down.
> > > There's a significant user community, but not a significant
> > > developer community. 
> > 
> > Which pretty much sums up a dilemma in the development of
> > FreeBSD, I think. Developers want users to try out their new
> > shiny stuff, but users don't want to spend time upgrading.
> 
> For me, personally, one significant problem is that I don't
> have the resources to easily run several versions of FreeBSD
> at home.
> 
> I have a stable/8 installation, but I can't easily install
> another one (i.e. stable/7) at the same time, which would
> be required for testing and support.  Well, I could set up
> a dual-boot environment somehow with a second disk, but
> that's time-consuming and annoying.
> 
> I also have to confess that my motivation to spend time
> supporting an "old" branch is somewhat low because I don't
> use that branch myself anymore for some time already.
> Probably quite a few developers are in a similar situation,
> I guess.

I think this is the core "problem". Statistics[1] show, that most
developers run some form of -CURRENT and also have some machines running
the latest -STABLE tree. So, naturally, no-one is too thrilled about
testing stuff for the pre-latest -STABLE tree.

We should not try to have two stable branches overlap for that long. We
are spreading our resources too thin here.

CURRENT+STABLE makes sense, always. CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE might be nice
for vendors, but in the end it's the developers doing the work, and they
mostly only care about the one of the STABLES. We should not delude
ourselves into thinking we can easily support two STABLE branches,
that's just not happening.

Uli

[1] I just made this statistic up.