A request for release engineering

[Robroy Gregg]

On Fri, 11 May 2018, 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.

I wonder how many other people are like me--planning to "float" from 
10.3-RELEASE to 11.2-RELEASE on some computers, just to face the devil 
once instead of twice (the devil to which I refer's the one who's "in the 
details" every time I change anything on a server).