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Date:      Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:09:16 -0800
From:      Devin Teske <devin.teske@fisglobal.com>
To:        "'Garrett Cooper'" <yanegomi@gmail.com>, <WBentley@futurecis.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   RE: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle
Message-ID:  <03a901ccd56d$09eb2a20$1dc17e60$@fisglobal.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAGH67wS3mvPCBKG36iQ8qtA89GGk1r3KEp4QHj6nt8y9nB8uEA@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com>	<1326756727.23485.10.camel@Arawn> <CAGH67wS3mvPCBKG36iQ8qtA89GGk1r3KEp4QHj6nt8y9nB8uEA@mail.gmail.com>

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> hackers@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Garrett Cooper
> Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 4:07 PM
> To: WBentley@futurecis.com
> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle
> 
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 3:32 PM, William Bentley <William@futurecis.com>
> wrote:
> > I also echo John's sentiments here. Very excellent points made here.
> > Thank you for voicing your opinion. I was beginning to think I was the
> > only one who felt this way.
> >
> > I also have several FreeBSD installations spread across different
> > development/production systems and it is not feasible to always
> > upgrade to the latest and greatest. Part of why FreeBSD is difficult
> > to adopt into more of the commercial/government sectors is because of
> > this fast paced release cycle and most of the important patches/fixes
> > are not backported far enough. This is why most of my customers decide
> > to use Solaris or RedHat and not FreeBSD. (Not looking to start a
> > flame war about the OS choice/etc just pointing out the Release cycle
> > model). I would love to push FreeBSD harder but it is becoming
> > increasingly difficult as of late.
> >
> > We seem to have lost our way around the release of FreeBSD 7. I am all
> > in favor of new features but not at the risk of stability and proper
> > life cycle management.
> >
> > Are me and John the only people that feel this way or are we among the
> > minority?
> 
>     You aren't. There are other people like Devin Teske's group that feel the
same
> (they're upgrading from 4.x to 8.2! Brave man.. and godspeed to him),

Thanks!

Actually, we're jumping from 4.11 to 8.1 (not 8.2 -- reason as follows).

A lot of the problems we're having in 8.1 still exist in 8.2 (but will go-away
in 8.3, according to what we're seeing already-committed to RELENG_8 tag beyond
the RELENG_8_2_0_RELEASE tag -- that is, if 8.3 ever gets produced!). Therefore,
we've seen no need to push 8.2 (in-fact, we've internally black-listed it
because it doesn't fix anything we care about). So far, we've made over 10
patches to FreeBSD-8.1, and not a one of them would have been needed for 8.3,
but all of them would still be needed for 8.2.

I might add that we're doing an in-place binary migration from 4.11 to 8.1 using
a very sophisticated sh(1) script named "host_rebuild" which we'll be releasing
later this year. It allows binary migration both forwards, backwards, and even
stationary (re-installing the same OS, to either migrate architecture or simply
rebuild the OS).


> along with
> some development organizations that depend on long release cycles (IronPort,
> Isilon, etc).

I brought this up in last weekend's BAFUG meeting...

We're _very_ interested in replicating the long-lifecycle of the 4-series with a
newer series. But which one?

Right now, we're jumping to the 8-series, but after seeing that one of the major
focal points for 9 is McKusick's SU+J (SoftUpdates Journaling -- tunefs -j
enable), I'm ready to say that the 9-series should instead be the "chosen
outlier" when it comes to picking one single release to have an ultra-wide
lifecycle.

The 9-series represents the first release to integrate a journaled filesystem
by-default into the system (aka boot) filesystem(s). We were pleasantly
surprised to see that the default installer enabled SU+J by-default when
choosing "guided" and "auto" for disk partitioning.

NOTE: We hated gjournal -- too clunky as a "bolt-on" solution. SU+J is a breath
of fresh-air as it's truly integrated into the filesystem and recognized at the
base FreeBSD level.
-- 
Devin


>     That being said. More people, more likelihood to succeed with what you
need,
> like julian@ suggests. I like long release cycles too for stuff that I find
critical and
> "in production", like my router. My fileserver is a slightly different story,
but I just
> got off the CURRENT bandwagon off on to the 9-STABLE bandwagon :).
> Cheers,
> -Garrett
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