Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 15:01:23 -0500 From: linimon@lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> Cc: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 Available Message-ID: <20050715200123.GA24052@soaustin.net> In-Reply-To: <20050715115650.I66818@ganymede.hub.org> References: <42D79676.6040606@samsco.org> <20050715115650.I66818@ganymede.hub.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
While Scott's and Colin's responses should be viewed as canonical, for the record the place that the support matrix is documented is on the Security web page at http://www.freebsd.org/security/security.html#adv. Note that this only applies to the _security_ team. Traditionally the ports team has tried to keep everything going on at least those branches; however, in the near future this is going to start becoming more problematic, due to both the growth in the number of ports; the larger number of simultaneous -stable releases we are trying to support; and the fact that many developers have moved away from 4.X. (In particular, it is my understanding that the next release of GNOME due this fall is not going to be supported, by default, on 4.X; the next major release of KDE, due sometime later this year, will probably not be either. From this, it might be reasonable to conclude that the time that 4.X is viable for the desktop are drawing to a close.) Also to reiterate, the differences (at least for ports) between 5.X and 6.X is much smaller than for 4.X and 5.X; the difference between 6.X and 7.X is even smaller than that. Although I can't cite statistics in this case, my guess from reading the mailing lists is that most ports work is now being done on 5.X or 6.X and then only retrofitted to 4.X when demand warrants it. Finally, consider that if you want to upgrade from 4.X to 6.X without doing a complete reinstall, IIRC you will have to first upgrade to 5.X on the way in any case. Of course, whether or not one should do a complete reinstall between major versions _anyway_ is another discussion entirely. As a side-note, due to the size requirements in the FTP archives, it is becoming increasingly difficult to house packages for every supported release. Although there is no concrete decision yet, it seems likely that we will need to drop the 5.3-RELEASE packages and only archive packages for 5.4-RELEASE and 5-STABLE. If so, this will probably set a precedent for future releases (e.g. only having the latest release and latest snapshot for each major release). These are all things that people should take into account when trying to decide which release to upgrade to. My own view is that users who want to use packages are really going to be well-advised to be on either 5.4 or 6.0 pretty quickly; and that anyone who wishes to stay on 4.X for much longer should be prepared to increasingly provide their own ports support. mcl
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050715200123.GA24052>