Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:34:59 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Andriy Gapon <avg@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1201181132450.51158@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <4F1543C2.8050404@FreeBSD.org> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com> <4F1543C2.8050404@FreeBSD.org>
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On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Andriy Gapon wrote: > on 17/01/2012 00:28 John Kozubik said the following: >> we going to run RELEASE software ONLY > > My opinion: you've put yourself in a box that is not very compatible with > the current FreeBSD release strategy. With your scale and restrictions you > probably should just use the FreeBSD source and roll your own releases from > a stable branch of interest (including testing, etc). Or have your own > "branch" where you could cherry-pick interesting changes from any FreeBSD > branches. Tools like e.g. git and mercurial make it easy. Of course, this > strategy is not as easy as trying to persuade the rest of FreeBSD > community/project/thing to change its ways, but perhaps a little bit more > realistic. You can bond with similarly minded organizations to share > costs/work/etc. It's a community-driven project after all. Suppose for a moment we get the .x release process fixed: we start cutting regular point releases from -STABLE on a 6-month cycle (just a strawman). freebsd-update's update and upgrade features actually make tracking -STABLE at release engineered time slices plausible. One reason that's true is that between 5.x and 6.x, the FreeBSD Project underwent a substantive change in our approach to binary interfaces. In 4.x and before, the letters "ABI" rarely hit the mailing lists. In 6.x and later, it's a key topic discussed whenever merges to -STABLE come up. We now really care about keeping applications running as the OS moves under them. We also build packages to better-defined ABIs -- not perfectly, but OK. I think John gets a lot of what he wants if we just fix our release cycle. Robert
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