Upcoming Releases Schedule...

[John Baldwin]

Jo, so it seems to me that you could just start by maintaining your own set of 
extended support patches for the FreeBSD releases you care about.  I don't 
think you have to be a committer or secteam@ member to do this.  It does mean 
that you might not be able to fix a bug in, say, 6.2 at the same exact time 
the advisory goes out at first, but you could take the patch from the 
advisory and apply it to your local 6.2 tree and then update your "cumulative 
patch" (would probably want to use some sort of source code control for this 
where you basically branch from FreeBSD X.Y where X.Y is a vendor branch of 
sorts).  That would let you build the "street cred", as it were, to be able 
to get the patches directly into FreeBSD more easily.

To start with it is probably going to be a bit slow as far as getting things 
committed directly to FreeBSD proper as it means finding a committer who has 
the time to test and review your patch and then commit it.  However, 
the "Unofficial FreeBSD 6.2 Patchset" can be updated more quickly since it is 
something that would be under your control.  Also, doing this will give you 
insight into exactly what is required to support a release after it is EOL'd 
in a much more direct fashion than an e-mail thread.

-- 
John Baldwin