Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 10:37:25 -0700 From: Bill Jones <bjones@polestar.org> To: "Brian T.Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: strange ATA behavior with -STABLE Message-ID: <jUsT.aNoTheR.mEsSaGe.iD.10264095448130@www.polestar.org>
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An interesting point. Perhaps my perspective has been coming across as arguing the wrong side. I agree that new installs are the most important. Changes which enable FreeBSD to work on what sort of systems people are purchasing at Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City and other retailers should matter greatly. Secondary, but still important, is making sure the changes break the least amount of legacy hardware as possible. I'd consider 5-6 years a good rule of thumb. If the hardware has gone unsupported for 5 years, then if it's not a huge installed base, losing support for it in BSD will have minimal impact. There have been problems with 4.6-RELEASE with new installs -- CD- ROM problems come to mind immediately. These are related to the ata commits. I would like to see 4.6.1 remedy this situation before our reputation as simple-to-install, always-works OS begins to falter. Admittedly, I can't argue as strongly for my case and the fact that I haven't upgraded. After all, I'm already running FreeBSD. :) I'll hop off the soapbox now. bts@babbleon.org wrote: But the new drivers probably support more first-time installs than the old one does. I know that it corrected multiple problems for me. I *am* running on a laptop, though. OTOH, that's sure getting to be more common rather than less over time. The *problem* is that it also broke some old hardware that previously worked. If you agree that the most important is what will work for most *new* installs, I believe that you are probably arguing the wrong side of the issue, or at the very least it's not clear what the right side of the issue would be. If you want to argue that the commit was a bad idea, then you'd have a much stronger case by arguing that FreeBSD shouldn't break what previously worked so that people aren't afraid to upgrade. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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