Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support

[Bill Vermillion]

It's Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 12:00 . I'm in a small dim room with
doors labeled "Dungeon" and "Forbidden". There is noise, the door
marked Dungeon flies open and freebsd-stable-request at freebsd.org SHOUTS:


> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:43:54 +0000
> From: Pete French <petefrench at ticketswitch.com>
> Subject: Re: Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support
> To: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org, lofi at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <E1Gxkgk-0009V0-0j at dilbert.ticketswitch.com>

> > Because everybody knows that odd numbered releases aren't stable.

> I've been 20 years in electronics & comouting and thats the first
> time I have ever heard anyone say that! Steer clear of '.0' releases
> is well known, but suspecting something just because of the odd or
> evenness of it's numbering scheme seems like pure superstition.

> Especually since we are Unix people, and the two of the
> 'biggies' in history are Version 7, System 5 ;-)

And as system V progressed it got funkier and I moved the servers
at an ISP I was part of back in the mid-90s from a 1/2 dozen or so
SGI machine to FreeBSD and I felt I was back home again - as it was
so similar to the System III based/derived systems I learned on.

My first pass at Sys V was on and AT&T 3B2-310, and so many things
were far slower than what came before, and some of their programs
were so poor in execution it was a pain.   I once did a simple
benchmark and on an old Z80 based system I was getting times
in under 10 seconds in the C test and under 1 minute in the BASIC
version.  On the 3B2 the program seemed to hang in BASIC. I ran it
again and then broke out and looked at the variables.  I was aghast
when I mentally computed that the program would take an hour to
run.  The C version ran in a bit under 5 minutes.   I will say that
the 5.3 things got a bit better but not long after that most of the
smaller and the ones that seemed to have decent support disappeared
and left us with only a handful of SysV companies.

And then there is the classic 1.0 release of NeXTStep.  It was
pretty stable, considerning the last release before 1.0
was 0.99.   Jobs got a lot of press on that one :-)

> -pete.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com