Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 17:49:20 +0200 From: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: CLARITY re: challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3 Message-ID: <20080608154920.GA8266@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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Andy Kosela wrote: ... a really beutiful and elaborate post on the subject ... However, being an ordinary user with few machines running FreeBSD, i have seen on my limited sample that 2 machines worked better with 6.3 than 6.2 (two old Athlon machines, which work perfectly OK in fact) and one worked much worse (a P4 which used to be perfectly stable and suddenly panicked 3 times in a week). So i upgraded this last one to 7.0 and it is now working perfectly well without any trouble. The only "gotcha" is the slowness of X problem when compiling, but i live with that. Moral of the story: the developer base of FreeBSD is not large enough to maintain a large number of releases. In my humble opinion, having 8.0 7.0 and 6.* is even too much. The developers are working on 8.0, they still have a very good grasp of 7.0 but 6.* becomes old stuff, more or less forgotten. It then occurs that things are merged to the 6.* branch which are perhaps susceptible of destabilising it. Personnally i have seen the same occurring with 6.0, 5.0 and 4.*, for me the last releases of the 4.* were very poor on my laptop while the early 4.* releases were perfectly OK. I think it is very unreasonable for end users to ask maintaining, e.g. 6.2 ad vitam eternam. The real stable branch is now 7.* and diverting effort to polish the 6.* is a waste of time. People wanting a very stable system should simply use something else, like Debian stable, official RedHat, etc. whose aim is precisely to offer the maximum stability, with only security and bug fixes, and for extended periods of time. The price you pay is obsoleted and "unsexy" systems, which is probably OK for the intended use. On the other hand i have no business running such a system. -- Michel TALON
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