Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 12:00:55 -0700 From: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> To: Diego Calleja <diegocglinux@yahoo.es> Cc: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: The case for FreeBSD Message-ID: <42066967.1060300@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20050206194857.5920e369.diegocglinux@yahoo.es> References: <4205F382.8020404@freebsd.org> <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1050206132109.55669F-100000@fledge.watson.org> <20050206194857.5920e369.diegocglinux@yahoo.es>
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Diego Calleja wrote: >>So I guess my message would be this: we should focus our energy in >>demonstrating (and making sure) FreeBSD is the best platform out there. >>We've done an incredible job, but we need to keep doing it. This includes > > > However, "people" seems to have the impression that 5.X is unstable and slow and > it don't really matters if it's true or not, it's what people associates with the number > "5.x" > > In my opinion, 5.x is not so bad as many people wants to think, but i think that the > freebsd developers have "failed" at telling people what those things are, and why > they should look better at 5.x. In the firefox 1.0 release it has been demonstrated > that agressive "marketing" _matters_ even if you are not a company. Firefox is > a great browser, but it would not have been as succesful if there was not so much > noise around it. What Freebsd needs is to make more noise, documeting changes > is good but it doesn't really makes lot of noise. The Firefox comparison is actually very apt. There are quite a few areas where Firefox is still inferior to the Mozilla Suite, but the team has done an _outstanding_ job of advertising Firefox for what it is. > > In my very humble opinion, what freebsd should do is concentrate in stability > and performance tuning for 5.4, then release 5.4 as 6.0 (which is not a bad idea > anyway) saying something like "we've learned of our errors, we've fixed all the major > problems, we've a excellent system because of [list of features] and we're working > hard to continue improving it". It looks stupid but many people are _aways_ going to > associate "5.x" with "failure" no matter how good you make it, calling the next > release 6.x would be a nice way of getting rid of all bad 5.x experiences and > "start again". And the paragraph would not be very untrue anyway. Maybe you hate > such "versionitis", but the true is that you're not going to run out of numbers to make > releases, so why not? > We're actually planning on releasing 6.0 this summer. I understand your points about 5.4, but it's a bit too late to do this is in a sane way. The 6.0-CURRENT development is already well underway and has diverged significantly from 5-STABLE, and trying to do CVS merge gymnastics on it won't make it any easier. Scott
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