Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Doug Barton]

On 3/29/2012 7:01 AM, Joe Greco wrote:
>> On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote:
>>> FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested
>>
>> As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically
>> it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer
>> version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed
>> since then.
>>
>> Doug
> 
> So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then.

That isn't what I said at all, sorry if I wasn't clear. The OP mentioned
9.0-RELEASE, and in the context of his message (which I snipped) he
mentioned 8-stable. That's what I was referring to.

> If you'll kindly go over to http://www.freebsd.org and look under
> "Latest Releases", please note that "8.2" is a production release.
> If you don't want it to be a production release, then find a way
> to make it so, but please don't snipe at people who are using the
> code that the FreeBSD project has indicated is a current production
> offering.
> 
> There are many good reasons not to run arbitrary snapshots on your
> production gear.  It's unrealistic to expect people to run non-
> RELEASE non-production code on their production gear.  We can have
> that discussion if you don't understand that, drop me a note off-
> list and I'll be happy to explain it.

I can see that you're upset about something, sorry if my message caused
you additional stress. I actually understand the realities of production
environments quite well, and believe it or not I agree with some of your
frustration about how we handle support for our "supported" releases.
We've had various public threads about these issues, which have sparked
some quite-lively private discussions amongst our committers, and I'm
hoping that once the long-overdue 8.3-RELEASE is out we'll be able to
buckle down and start putting some of those ideas into action.

Meanwhile, this is still a volunteer project, and as a result sometimes
the best way to get attention to a problem is to verify that it hasn't
already been fixed. You've been around more than long enough to
understand this Joe. We can spend time arguing about what *should* be
(actually we can't ...) but my point was in trying to help the OP get
the most/best help the fastest way possible.

Doug