No Extended Support Version right now?

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 17:05:51 +0200
Gerhard Schmidt <schmidt at ze.tum.de> wrote:

> Am 09.08.2018 um 13:41 schrieb Steve O'Hara-Smith:
> > On Thu, 9 Aug 2018 09:48:19 +0200
> > Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:
> >   
> >> Unfortunately it seems "extended support" is gone, so no further
> >> release (11.x or whatever) will be such.  
> > 
> > 	Given that 11 will last five years and it is likely that
> > 11.<last> will come out well within that period I would say than
> > N.<last> is as LTS as it gets.  
> 
> Sorry didn't get what you tried to say.
> 
> I don't see that 11.<last> will be out that much before the 5 years
> are up. FreeBSD tends to do releases long after the next major is
> released. 10.4 got released 1 month after 11.1.
> 
> Even if that will be so in the future right now we have the problem
> that we have to upgrade all systems currently running 10.4 to 11.2
> and the ones already running 11.1 two because 11.2 is the only
> release out there with more then 3 month support.
> 
> I never updated to a Version before least 2 Month (mostly I waited 3
> Month) after the Release to be sure every minor issue was fixed. Now i
> have to go to mainly unproven releases just to stay supported for
> Security updates.

we try to skip the odd releases. It works some how. Like 10 is near its
end but 12 is not out yet. So, running 10 a bit longer or adapting 12 a
bit earlier will be our solution.
> 
> Let's go to the future. FreeBSD does a new major release every 2 to 3
> Years and does a minor release every year. Even if the don't do a
> minor after the new major is released, you have a maximum of 2 years
> on the last release. And at the end of that period the latest release
> of the new Major isn't there yet. So you have to update again to a
> release that only has roughly a year and 3 month of support left.
> 
> I the past we updated mostly when the new extended support release
> was 3 to 6 month old. The new model gives no way of knowing if the
> version I'm updating to, will be supported for longer than 1 year. So
> nobody can do a serious resource planning other than planning an
> update every year. This raises the cost of using FreeBSD considerably.

Things nobody thinks here about.

Erich