Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 15:40:09 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Eric Harrison <Eric.Harrison@veritas.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Supported Releases Message-ID: <20010106154008.H77122@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <E157E02AD50CD41180EE00508B6A722D01D87CB6@mtvxch05.veritas.com>; from Eric.Harrison@veritas.com on Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 10:46:23AM -0800 References: <E157E02AD50CD41180EE00508B6A722D01D87CB6@mtvxch05.veritas.com>
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On Friday, 5 January 2001 at 10:46:23 -0800, Eric Harrison wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm a product manager doing some research and wondering if there is
> a policy or guideline that the FreeBDS board of directors/Community
> uses to gauge release lifecycles.
I suppose the "Board of Directors" would be the FreeBSD core team
(core@FreeBSD.org). We don't have such a policy or guideline.
> For example, how long will "community" energy be spent to support
> older previous releases, over new.
"Community" does what "community" wants to do. That's the big
difference from commercial software.
> Basically how long will a prior version be "supported". While this
> is a clear concept in commercial software firms, don't yet
> understand how this works with FreeBSD and community maintained OS.
Well, I spent decades in the support division of a big commercial
company, and we had this official policy:
We will support the current major release and the previous major
release.
What that mean in practice was:
We will support the current major release if the bug's not too
minor, the previous major release if it's a serious bug, and older
releases if a big customer is upset about it.
The attitude (I couldn't really call it a policy) in FreeBSD is pretty
similar.
> What I'm trying to ultimately decide is how long we need to provide
> support for prior FreeBSD releases.
Again, see above. What's a major release? That's a question of
interpretation. Since 3.x, we have had incremental releases with a
single digit 'x'. In between, we have the -STABLE release, so we now
(still) have a FreeBSD 3-STABLE release. From time to time we take a
snapshot of -STABLE and call it 3.x-RELEASE. Once the dust has
settled, we continue with changes to -STABLE.
Looking at it like this, I'd be inclined to say we support:
- the latest released version of FreeBSD (currently 4.2)
- the corresponding -STABLE version (4-STABLE)
In addition, we might support, in order of decreasing importance:
- the previous major version of FreeBSD (3-STABLE)
- the previous version of FreeBSD of the same major release (4.1)
- the last release of the previous major version of FreeBSD
(3.5-RELEASE)
The reason for this ordering is that support for 3-STABLE almost
always implies support for 3.5-RELEASE. People are reluctant to
increment the major number, especially in commercial environments, so
there will be a significant number of people still using 3-<foo>.
Similarly, fixes to 4.2-RELEASE might still apply to 4.1-RELEASE.
These opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views
of the FreeBSD core team.
Greg
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