Schedule for releases

[Ade Lovett]

On Dec 22, 2010, at 08:42 , John Baldwin wrote:
> Actually, CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE doesn't really work for the vendors either
> versus a CURRENT+STABLE where STABLE branches were created less often and
> lasted longer.

CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE doesn't really work too well for ports/packages either.  Indeed, it was only recently that it was CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE+STABLE .. and there are sufficient enough changes from 6.x->9.x (now 7.x->9.x) that causes a reasonable amount of pain.  'grep -R OSVERSION /usr/ports'

for infrastructure stuff (give or take):

[lab:/usr/ports] 54% grep -R OSVERSION Mk/* | grep if | wc -l
      16

for the tree as a whole:

[lab:/usr/ports] 55% grep -R OSVERSION . | grep if | wc -l
    1262

Further compounded by i386, amd64, and the few other architectures that get things built for them on a semi-regular basis.

Keeping packages up to date for all these combinations is, at a guess, an order of magnitude more time-consuming than say, 'cd /usr/src; make universe' and whilst the clang/llvm folks are doing an excellent job, in the not too distant future, ports/ will be faced with interesting_times.cn handling builds for two completely different base compilers.

Anything more than one STABLE, and one CURRENT, and folks will be getting upset somewhere along the way, particularly when using FreeBSD (src+ports/packages+doc) vs FreeBSD (src only).

-aDe