A request for release engineering

[Matthew Seaman]

On 11/05/2018 08:38, Kristof Provost wrote:
> On 11 May 2018, at 9:11, Arthur Chance wrote:
>> On 10/05/2018 19:15, Manish Jain wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have no idea whether this is the right list to make this request to.
>>> But I could not find any other list that would definitely be better 
>>> suited.
>>>
>>> I noticed when trying to build a port under my 10.3 box that support for
>>> 10.3 has now expired. I have no problems with that - I will install 12
>>> afresh when it becomes available later this year.
>>>
>>> But since installing afresh demands a whole effort, I request that
>>> FreeBSD reduce its new releases to one per year, while the support
>>> period is increased to 3 years per release.
>>>
>>> Does this sound like a good request to others too ?
>>>
>>
>> The FreeBSD support model was announced over three years ago:
>>
>> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-February/001624.html 
>>
>>
>> In particular
>>
>> - Each new release from the stable/X branch deprecates the previous
>>   release on the branch, providing a three-month window within which
>>   consumers are urged to upgrade to the latest release.  During this
>>   three-month window, Security Advisories and Errata Notices will still
>>   be issued for the previous release, as necessary.
>>
>> Why not simply update to 10.4?
>>
> FreeBSD 10.4 reaches end-of-life on October 31, 2018. At this point I’d 
> recommend an upgrade to 11.1 right now, to get to a supported version 
> and then an upgrade to 11.2 within three months of the release of 11.2.
> There should be very few surprised in the upgrade from 10.3 to 11.1 and 
> none in the 11.1 to 11.2 upgrade.

There's a working group on release scheduling and support lifetimes 
planned for during BSDCan next month.  The current thinking is that we 
have two quite disparate sets of requirements amoungst the user base: 
people that need a long-term stable system for around a 5 year support 
lifetime -- so only security patches and fixes for major regressions -- 
plus people that basically want to run something close to the bleeding 
edge with support for all the latest hardware and performance and other 
code improvements, which means a new release every few months.

	Cheers,

	Matthew