Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 14:21:21 +0100 (BST) From: William Palfreman <william@palfreman.com> To: Stefan Cars <stefan@snowfall.se> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 4.8 or 5.0 ? Message-ID: <20030423134610.K632@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> In-Reply-To: <3EA6859E.8020206@snowfall.se> References: <3EA67F9D.4030003@snowfall.se> <20030423131623.Y632@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz> <3EA6859E.8020206@snowfall.se>
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On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Stefan Cars wrote: > My reason for installing 5.0 is that we will probably want to upgrade to > 5.1 or maybe 5.2 when they arrive and I think that upgrading 5.0->5.2 is > easier than 4.8->5.2. ? Yeah, but not impossible. Where I used to work there were any number of machines roaring away on 3-STABLE, with uptimes many of hundreds of days. All you end up with are some machines with 4-STABLE, and some point in the future some 5-STABLE ones too. If the service facing untrusted users is kept securely updated, you could probably get away with using 4-STABLE for the entire lifetime of the hardware. Realistically, what new features are you going to need from future 5-STABLE releases for most server tasks on what will be by then legacy hardware? If it really comes down to needing to upgrade, you can still achieve that, with more effort then, certainly, but it is do-able, and in the mean time you get a good long period of solid work out of the 4-R/4-STABLE servers that you have. The only person I know who uses 5-CURRENT for production work is also a FreeBSD committer. The thought of me using 5-CURRENT for production work makes me feel ill. I have never used it, and I have no intention of using it until at least 5.3. Doing other peoples beta testing in production is _horrible_. I've been bitten by that before with both Linux 2.4 and BIND 9, and both times it made me look incompetent to my employers. Both times there were perfectly good stable alternatives that I didn't use because, either the website or the lying documentation said it was the one to use, or I thought I would gain valuable skills by being an early adopter, or I thought I could sort out what problems there were. Both times it made me look incompetent, it took up a huge amount of time, and caused loss of service. Don't do it! Let the mistakes happen to other people! Anyway, from reading the FreeBSD 5.x roadmap, it seems there is still a lot of work to be done bringing the fine grained SMP system to the currently giant-locked subsystems - the disk subsystem, for example. Nasty. Think of all those poor admins who got bitten by the capricious VM system change in Linux about 2.4.10, and count yourself lucky that you have the good sense not to use untested software in unnecessary production use! Bill :-)
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