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[Aristedes Maniatis]

On 21/09/2008, at 10:34 AM, netgeek wrote:

> Perhaps there is a middle ground here?  What about a statement that  
> each major branch (6.x, 7.x) will be supported for at least 24+  
> months from its last production release?  Smaller periods of support  
> could be given to minor releases along the way (7.2, for example),  
> but at least companies would know that if they installed a 6.x  
> version, they'd have support for a couple of years, even if that  
> might mean upgrading to a newer minor version if there was a problem.

This is already the case [1]. From each major branch one or more  
releases are designated as 'extended' and supported for 24 months. All  
you have to do is pick one of those and you've got support for 24  
months. For example 6.3 has extended support in this way.

RELENG_6 itself will be supported 24 months after the last release.  
Given roughly 18 months between major releases and about 12 months of  
ongoing releases from the previous branch after that, 4.5 years is  
roughly how long each major branch is supported for. That is already  
clear as could be. I can't quite understand what Jo Rhett is offering  
to the community that he is upset isn't being taken up. I think he  
wants some other arbitrary point release to be given extended support,  
either because in his case 24 months is not enough, or because he  
wants every release to have 24 months of support, or something else,  
I'm not sure.

Jo, you say that he have had to maintain your own patched build of old  
FreeBSD releases because you need to keep them in production for  
longer than EoL period. Can I suggest that the first step is for you  
to publish those patches somewhere public and allow others to have  
access to them. Then you'll have a chance of convincing others to  
contribute to your patch sets and eventually of convincing FreeBSD to  
officially sanction them. Go and create a new sourceforge project or  
convince your boss to set aside some space on his web site/svn server/ 
etc for this project. Tell him that if it goes well, you'll be  
creating a whole lot of good will for the company in addition to the  
prospect of getting other people to contribute and share the work.


Ari Maniatis



[1] http://security.freebsd.org/



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