Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:53:22 -0500 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <201201180853.22254.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <jf3mps$is3$1@dough.gmane.org> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1112211415580.19710@kozubik.com> <jf3mps$is3$1@dough.gmane.org>
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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
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