Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 09:54:13 -0800 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> To: Bigby James <bigby.james@dimthoughts.com> Cc: "freebsd-acpi@freebsd.org" <freebsd-acpi@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Lenovo T520: Present (-STABLE) vs. Future (-CURRENT) ACPI Support Message-ID: <CAJ-Vmok6Jv7=GOB7Fnw9TF5_p0aLwY2kvn%2B-rK0d4CfasZW1qA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20141226165731.GA28169@workbox.Home> References: <20141226165731.GA28169@workbox.Home>
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Hi! On 26 December 2014 at 08:57, Bigby James <bigby.james@dimthoughts.com> wrote: > Howdy-ha, folks, > > Please forgive my ignorance if my question is rather mundane and/or inane. I'm > pretty new to FreeBSD and its development cycle. Here's my situation: I've > recently migrated my laptop (Levovo Thinkpad T520) to FreeBSD using the > 10.1-STABLE snapshot, and most everything works pretty well. The only > exceptions are some of the hardware keys, including the LCD brightness control > keys, which is something I'd really like to have. > > Before going ahead with that install, though, on a lark I decided to try out the > 11-CURRENT snapshot to see how it worked out. As it turns out, everything > presently missing from 10-STABLE worked out of the box on -CURRENT. So I know > that full support for my machine is in the source tree now and, barring any > fundamental changes in the development branch, will be in the next -RELEASE. I > don't really have the time, know-how or guts to maintain a -CURRENT install on > this machine, so for the time being I'm sticking with 10-STABLE. So I'm > wondering just how often ACPI functionality gets moved from the -CURRENT branch > into the most recent release's -STABLE branch. In other words, what are the > chances that the features I'm waiting for will get moved into the 10-STABLE > branch in the near future? Are the ACPI devs pretty conservative with this? For > the time being I can control screen brightness using xrandr, and as fond as I am > with the convenience it is just a convenince all the same, so I can always > remain patient. But I'm wondering if there's a way to know if and when ACPI > functionality will get backported to -STABLE. I currently follow this list and > the SVN mailing list for 10-STABLE, so I can also just keep an eye on them if > that's the answer. Thanks in advance. Thanks for asking! developers backport to freebsd-stable (and earlier branches) whenever they have a need or desire. There's no hard and fast policy requiring it as we're all volunteers and there's noone being paid to maintain or develop laptop / tablet support for FreeBSD. In my particular case I run FreeBSD-HEAD on almost everything, and thus I don't backport things. I have enough limits on my time right now and trying to backport and test everything would be very time consuming. Other developers are different - some will run stable/10 (or stable/9!) and will end up backporting things that they need for whichever hardware they're using. But outside of a handful of strange situations, FreeBSD-HEAD has been remarkably wonderful to use as a desktop for the last 18 months. -adrian
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