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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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