Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:56:15 -0800 From: Julian Elischer <julian@freebsd.org> To: Mark Felder <feld@feld.me> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <4F15C44F.1030208@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <op.v78i3yxi34t2sn@tech304> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com> <op.v78i3yxi34t2sn@tech304>
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On 1/17/12 7:39 AM, Mark Felder wrote: > Why is everyone so afraid of running -STABLE? Plenty of stuff gets > MFC'd. Yeah, I agree -- running -RELEASE is difficult. Hell, it's > frustrating to us that VMWare only supports -RELEASE and it took > until ESX 5 to officially support 8.2! > > More releases / snapshots of -STABLE helps people on physical > servers, but anyone who runs VMs on Xen or VMWare won't get any > support for those versions because they didn't go through the QA > process yet. FreeBSD is increasingly becoming a third world citizen > thanks to virtualization efforts being focused on Linux, so I feel > that more frequent releases won't help as many people as you think. I'm going to go both ways on this one. Where I used to work (Devin Teske is now there) we used to use the 'stable' branch and rolll our own releases. the criticality of those systems was hard to over-emphasize. In 2005 we worked out we processed 1.5 trillion dollars of transactions on those systems. The other side of the coin is that we had the resources to have someone (me) tracking the branch. I only spun a release when I thought it was a good time to do so, but I always had a year or so advance warning of when a new release was likely to be needed so I could select a good moment from over a wide range. Also ran a layer on the top of the sources where I could add cherry-picked back-ports and changes as part of our release. If it came to that maybe all the people who are currently saying they need better support of the 8.x branch could get together and together, support someone to do that job for them..would 1/5th of a person be too expensive for them? if not, what is a reasonable cost? Is it worth 1/20 th of a person? Julian
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