Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:41:23 -0600 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> To: Hugo Silva <hugo@barafranca.com> Cc: Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <20120117224123.GC509@over-yonder.net> In-Reply-To: <4F15C48F.7020302@barafranca.com> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com> <jf3mps$is3$1@dough.gmane.org> <CAFHbX1%2Bi3JwCCBmqtOsW6m74VpDBSAmBOt7CPcCGAPCO2DBDkA@mail.gmail.com> <CAF-QHFV8oj=ipwcsVo3e3P3kgGBPr%2Bz1gRzn3D3PT%2Bc0pHJtcQ@mail.gmail.com> <4F15C48F.7020302@barafranca.com>
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On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 06:57:19PM +0000 I heard the voice of Hugo Silva, and lo! it spake thus: > > Come to think about it, those days are pretty much gone since 4.x > (incidentally, many of us who've stuck with FreeBSD for this long > think of 4.x as an epic series). Having been a FreeBSD user for a very long time, I don't think of 4.x as epic. I think of 5.x as a clusterf...un. 4.x didn't last such a long time because everyone thought it was awesome, it was because the next version was still so broken it was the only thing we had to release. And the reason it developed whatever excess "stability" it may have had is _because_ it was moribund. It's trivial to avoid introducing new bugs to software; all you have to do is never change it. The next best thing is to make very small targetted changes with enormous care to make them local. But that means you DON'T get things like new drivers and infrastructure and so on, because those are just the sort of big changes that are likely to create new problems even as they solve existing ones. At some point aroudn X.4 or X.5 it stops being -STABLE and starts just being -STALE. For me, the smaller jumps between major releases are a *GOOD* thing, because it makes it parsecs easier to move between them. Moving a system from 4 to 5 was a giant nightmare of everything breaking. The only thing I can remember worse was moving from 2.2 to 3 (and actually, most of my 2.2 systems either stayed that way until they died, or got moved via *HEROIC* efforts straight to 4). In contrast, moving from 6->7->8 was only a slightly larger bump than moving from 6.X to 6.Y. I have a specific system that I'm holding back moving from 8 to 9 now because of a specific change, and I'm sorta hoping I can retire that system before I have to try it. If we went back to the days of mega-major's, that would happen *EVERY* time. Now, there are some environments where upgrades are rare major events and every single upgrade (possibly excluding those that can be honestly described as "single targetted patch") requires a giant pile of from-scratch requalification. And in those cases, it's almost the same amount of work whether you're going from 4.6->4.7 as if you were doing 4.10->9.1. From that perspective, sure, giant lengthenings may sound like an excellent idea. But from the position of considering upgrades as common and minor things, giant leaps are a nightmare I want to avoid at all costs. > Maybe I'm horribly mistaken about the releasographics of production > FreeBSD users, but I think most of us tend to run -release [...] I doubt it would be easy to get stats. But you could probably draw a reasonable correlation between people using releases and binary packages, vs. source and port builds. That would probably be easier to get numbers on. -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
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