From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Feb 20 15:39:30 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B8E8916A4CE for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:39:30 +0000 (GMT) Received: from mail.soaustin.net (mail.soaustin.net [207.200.4.66]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFCC343D1F for ; Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:39:29 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from linimon@lonesome.com) Received: by mail.soaustin.net (Postfix, from userid 502) id 3B06514963; Sun, 20 Feb 2005 09:39:29 -0600 (CST) Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 09:39:29 -0600 (CST) From: Mark Linimon X-X-Sender: linimon@pancho To: Steven Hartland In-Reply-To: <005e01c5174d$1ce3a9d0$b3db87d4@multiplay.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: ports@freebsd.org cc: "Darryl L. Miles" cc: =?iso-8859-1?B?Qmr2cm4gS/ZuaWc=?= cc: Kris Kennaway Subject: Re: pkg_add for 5.2.1 no longer working... X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:39:30 -0000 On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Steven Hartland wrote: > From: "Darryl L. Miles" > > > There must be 1000's of systems out there running 5.2.1 right now and > > these system (overnight) have already begun the rather steep slope into > > unmaintainability. That's right. Here's a longish, but more polite, way of saying the same thing :-) 5.2.1 was a special case: as has been pointed out, a 'new technology' release. 5.3 is the first stable release on 5.X. 5.2.1 was always intended to have a short support life. In fact, it was intended to have a short development life, as well, but that failed due to it winding up with too many features in it. To fix this, the way FreeBSD does releases is now going to be completely changed: each .0 release will be done at around 18 months after the previous .0 release (instead of 3+ years); each .1 release will follow it after 4 months. The shorter cycles are intended to decrease the feature drift between major release numbers that was the bane of the 5.X development cycle, and thus encourage users to track the releases more closely (i.e. we are hoping most users will upgrade by either the .1 or .2 release). The 5.3 release cycle was extended by many weeks to try to get us from where 5.2.1 was (not yet ready for production) to 5.3 (ready for production). The QA effort leading to 5.3 was really intense to say the least. Now what's in 5.2.1 has drifted way behind 5.3 and we really need users to move to 5.3 to get as much testing done on the work that has gone into making it solid. There are some regressions in 5.3 but not many and from wearing my bugmeister hat it seems that there is real developer interest in fixing these. But on the other hand there were hundreds of bugs fixed during the 5.2.1->5.3 transition. So hopefully the short support cycle you've experienced for 5.2.1 will be a one-time occurrence for something so late in a major release cycle. In the future it should only be true for .0 releases. In truth there were a lot of users who went to 5.X (X < 3) who probably should not have. FreeBSD's mistake was to let the feature set drift so much from 4.X to 5.X that some users felt compelled to to get features they needed. The whole intent of shortening the major release cycles is to prevent this very problem in the future. > > Free BSD's policy seems to read that once a new mainline release comes > > out, users now have to start building their own binary ports for their > > old version of Free BSD. That's only true for cases where a new -STABLE branch is created, such as happened with 5.3, where all packages had to be rebuilt because the shared library bumps happened just before 5.3-RELEASE. We've learned from that lesson, as well, and intend to do the bumps much, much, earlier in each major release cycle. But the key is your use of 'mainline release': 5.2.1 was never intended to be a 'mainline release', it was always a 'technology preview'. The previous 'mainline release' is really 4.11 and it still has packages available for it and will continue to in the medium-term. mcl