Upcoming Releases Schedule...

[Jo Rhett]

> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 04:30:26PM +1000, Andrew Snow wrote:
>> I think FreeBSD is getting in a difficult position now because  
>> there's
>> so much cool new stuff being shoe-horned in, but without the  
>> necessary
>> volume of contributors to back it up with testing and bug fixes.

On Sep 15, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:
> We're interested in suggestions about how to get more people involved
> with testing and bug fixes.
>
> There's certainly no lack of demand for the features -- all the way  
> from
> running on inexpensive wireless routers all the way up to 'enterprise-
> grade' distributed storage solutions.  (These are real examples from
> various mailing lists.)
>
> So, in your opinion, what's the way to reconcile all these demands
> (features + stability + long-term support of release branches) with
> a group that is 95%-plus volunteer effort?


As I have said to you directly in personal e-mail, the maintenance  
schedule is creating a chicken and egg problem.  If companies weren't  
forced to run internal distribution and release management on their  
own, they could allocate more resources (ie volunteers -- PAID ones!)  
to testing and release management of the main distribution.

To speak personally from my own experience: our business can not  
afford to pay me to help develop a release effort with an unknown  
maintenance period (6.4-REL).  Since we need to have a clear  
maintenance window for any installed/upgraded host, we are forced to  
provide that support internally.

If we had known (and longer than 12 month) maintenance periods for a  
given release, then I could avoid maintaining this infrastructure  
internally and would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours a  
month I could dedicate to testing and bug fixes of FreeBSD as a whole.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source  
and other randomness