duration of the ports freeze

[Michel Talon]

Thierry Thomas wrote:

> Anyway, if the freeze is too long, and if the new version is released
> several weeks after the thaw, very few will install these packages:
> a lot of updates will be committed, and many users will update their
> ports tree to install the new versions. This is very difficult to find a
> good compromise!

As you are saying, this is a question of compromise. You can stay months
and months with everything frozen in the vain hope of chasing every bug.
This is typically what Debian Stable does and why it always ships with
obsoleted software.

Or you can rush to deliver the latest and greatest with minimal quality
assurance, typically what Mandrake has done frequently, so gaining bad
reputation. 

In my opinion, FreeBSD has a very good compromise, it delivers
reasonably recent ports, wich are reasonably working. The ports freeze
is certainly not longer than many in the past, let us thank the ports
developers for the good job they are doing. This job is one of the main
assets of FreeBSD.

People who want to play with software in obvious beta state, like KDE4.0
are welcome to install Ubuntu on a spare partition and download the KDE4
packages. From the messages on Ubuntu forums, the stability is poor.

-- 

Michel TALON