From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 21 17:56:21 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B66641065747; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:56:21 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from yanegomi@gmail.com) Received: from mail-yi0-f54.google.com (mail-yi0-f54.google.com [209.85.218.54]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5946D8FC15; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:56:21 +0000 (UTC) Received: by yie19 with SMTP id 19so529741yie.13 for ; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:56:20 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:subject:mime-version :content-type:from:in-reply-to:date:cc:content-transfer-encoding :message-id:references:to:x-mailer; bh=meEgm8jAka6gswkxuGbEj1UZzGvPMkPUILuSKEzwYU0=; b=pbnhI3RyZt8SVcbNJbP3qpGrtigTgHTDfUZjqh7SNECfkvylu8Ke9KWPt00wjAE3XK zhRv1lzNDt8hiucZhY24ylR3I7ONjO65NGyApBHENONr3igryUzKb1FEiffgPU7bZOtH IFwYZ/PhjuieMYpMncZXDuLy2TD88XgJ74A7Y= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=subject:mime-version:content-type:from:in-reply-to:date:cc :content-transfer-encoding:message-id:references:to:x-mailer; b=IiiUcEtGKXEvX/Cd5uRaGtr8K7v9O9B03f7ma2E1EwL1KDZKQlPMhmCjn+wjEyfk/s k9wOPDakdU/Xc1QgfpuWowF9HdoMsjtodOlrqakQaVMbESl2kTv6+KUgW4HBLQ2BYKI9 IyhjeS7N64yZLOwYd1lCWiNKiH7vvjFm8rSlI= Received: by 10.236.103.175 with SMTP id f35mr2051872yhg.27.1292954180506; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:56:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from starr-wireless.local (c-24-130-10-228.hsd1.ca.comcast.net [24.130.10.228]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id 72sm2959077yhl.38.2010.12.21.09.56.18 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5); Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:56:19 -0800 (PST) Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1082) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: Garrett Cooper In-Reply-To: Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:56:16 -0800 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <8A01BB52-1A71-4185-9120-F36F0B6C160D@gmail.com> References: To: mdf@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1082) Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Schedule for releases X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:56:21 -0000 On Dec 21, 2010, at 9:47 AM, mdf@FreeBSD.org wrote: > I suspect this has been discussed before but I wanted to bring it up > again in light of my experience using FreeBSD as the base for a > commercial product. >=20 > Commercial life cycles can be rather long. For me, I started working > on porting Isilon's code base to FreeBSD 7.1 in May of 2009, at the > time knowing nothing about FreeBSD and extremely little about Isilon's > code base. For reference, at the time 7.1 was the most recent > RELENG_7 branch, and CURRENT had not yet been cloned into RELENG_8. > For various business reasons, at the time we did not want to track > CURRENT so settled on a local svn mirror of stable/7 to make pulling > patches easier. >=20 > Fast forward about 9 months and the merge project is complete, and > tested, and we're all happy. But FreeBSD has moved on a bit, with 8.1 > out any day now. Now fast forward another 6 months, and here we are > today, with 7.4 about to come out and EOL the stable/7 branch, and the > product based on FreeBSD stable/7 finally hitting GA. >=20 > My point in all this is that commercial software endeavors can be > multi-year efforts. But the support for stable/7 is pretty low now; I > noticed over the last year that many MFC's went to stable/8 but not > stable/7. >=20 > So the question: >=20 > Should FreeBSD support release branches for a longer time period? I > am assuming that after 7.4 comes out only security fixes will be going > into stable/7. The difficulty with supporting the release comes > partly because of KBI/ABI changes. It may be that CURRENT has changed > enough that it's just not practical to support a release that was > initially cloned 2 1/2 years ago. >=20 > For various reasons I am hoping that the next merge project we do > locally will be to CURRENT, because that makes staying in sync with > FreeBSD and returning our code to the community easiest. But making > the business case isn't quite as simple. We're still stuck on 6.x to a large degree at IronPort :(... 8.x = -- what's 8.x :/...? So yes, it would be nice to have a longer lifecycle on some = releases, but I fear that the problem is most likely scalability and = that FreeBSD needs more automated tests. It can also painful backporting = features and bugfixes to old releases, but that's a different note that = I'm sure every developer on the list is already aware of. security folks = could answer this question a lot better (cperciva, simon, et all). Thanks, -Garrett=