From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 18 14:10:01 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C9C11065674; Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:10:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jhb@freebsd.org) Received: from cyrus.watson.org (cyrus.watson.org [65.122.17.42]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D3B348FC17; Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:10:00 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bigwig.baldwin.cx (bigwig.baldwin.cx [96.47.65.170]) by cyrus.watson.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 89E1246B06; Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:10:00 -0500 (EST) Received: from jhbbsd.localnet (unknown [209.249.190.124]) by bigwig.baldwin.cx (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 1025FB91C; Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:10:00 -0500 (EST) From: John Baldwin To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:53:22 -0500 User-Agent: KMail/1.13.5 (FreeBSD/8.2-CBSD-20110714-p10; KDE/4.5.5; amd64; ; ) References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <201201180853.22254.jhb@freebsd.org> X-Greylist: Sender succeeded SMTP AUTH, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.2.7 (bigwig.baldwin.cx); Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:10:00 -0500 (EST) Cc: Ivan Voras Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:10:01 -0000 On Tuesday, January 17, 2012 6:41:48 am Ivan Voras wrote: > (answering out of order) > > On 16/01/2012 23:28, John Kozubik wrote: > > > 2) Having two simultaneous production releases draws focus away from > > both of them, and keeps any release from ever truly maturing. > > This isn't how things work. The -CURRENT always has (and probably always > had and always will have) the focus of developers. This is not strictly true. At work we are using 8.2-ish, and so right now much of development happens on 8 and has to be forward ported to HEAD. I do think we are cutting stable branches a bit too often and that we could merge features back to older branches more aggressively. SVN had made that much easier (e.g. merging superpages from 8 back to 7). However, it is more work for a developer to merge a change back to 2 or 3 branches (e.g. from HEAD to 9 to 8 to 7). Developers are more willing to merge things back to one or two branches. Right now we have made a design decision to release new X.0 releases (and cut new branches) at a certain frequency (and we aren't even keeping up). We could choose to alter that design and I think we would end up with longer-lived stable branches as a result. -- John Baldwin