Long Term support versions?

[@lbutlr]

On 13 Nov 2018, at 04:15, Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2018 03:50:16 -0700 "@lbutlr" <kremels at kreme.com> wrote:
>> And 11,2 is the only current version I see
>> <https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.2R/announce.html>, but it is marked
>> to be EOLed at 11.3 +3month so where is a stable release that will have a
>> longer support window?
> 
> 	There isn't one, at least not until 11.<final> whatever <final> may
> be (I'd guess 3 or 4 but that's just my guess), that will remain supported
> until September 2021 which may be long enough for 12.<final> to arrive. I'd
> like to think that, ultimately, tracking n.<final> will become a viable
> strategy.

IIRC, this has not been the case in the past. Certainly all support for 10.x expired long before 11.2-RELEASE and we're quite a long way from 11-FINAL. I don't think it was true of v4-9 either, but my memory on that is not necessarily reliable. I ran v3.2-RELEASE for a long time, but almost certainly far beyond its support window (I updated to 4.5 and then 4.11 which I kept for years).

Having a predefined end-date for support on 11.x is odd when there's no final version. It seems that 11-FINAL should be supported for a period of time based on either when 11-FINALE comes out or until 12-FINAL plus a year or something.

I mean, it's great that people are bing encouraged to update, but it's at the cost of stability.

My impression of the Linux world is that LTS windows are increasing while FreeBSD is not. (Just an impression, I'm not using Linux, but I am pretty sure a friend is using Mint with a 5 year LTS version).


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