Which Releases are still"supported"

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 09:36:19AM +0200, bsd at perimeter.co.za wrote:
> Hi all. 
> 
> I know things are very different in the Open Source world, so the concept 
> of "officially supported" versions is probably nonsense, but here's my 
> dilemma: 
> I received an email from Cyclades in which they told me:
> "I am sorry to tell you, but the latest FreeBSD version supported by our 
> driver is version 4.4. The driver is not tested with newer FreeBSD versions 
> and therefor we cannot support it." 
> 
> Now, since 4.4 was dated September 2001, it is now more than two years old. 
> I keep my servers up to date (currently at 4.8-p13). 
> 
> So - my question - is 4.4 still a "supported" branch, or has it now been 
> consigned to history?  I couldn't find any policy statement WRT older 
> releases at freebsd.org, though I might have looked in the wrong places... 

Most forms of support provided by the FreeBSD Project are on an ad-hoc
basis, since it's a community-supported project.

Typically, old releases do not get bug fixes beyond security fixes
(for a limited lifetime, see http://www.freebsd.org/security), so bug
reports against old releases are usually dealt with by asking the
originator to upgrade to the latest release to verify whether the
problem still exists, at which point an interested developer might be
able to address the problem.

A similar situation exists with the ports collection.  It is not
guaranteed to work with old releases, and updated packages are only
provided for the head of the -STABLE branch.

Kris

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