From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 21 17:47:09 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CA650106566B for ; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:47:09 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mdf356@gmail.com) Received: from mail-iw0-f182.google.com (mail-iw0-f182.google.com [209.85.214.182]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 94E848FC16 for ; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:47:09 +0000 (UTC) Received: by iwn39 with SMTP id 39so4462212iwn.13 for ; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:47:09 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:received:sender:received:date :x-google-sender-auth:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type; bh=rc4a26UPCysg9crm9eZCOog1f/r7XSpkV0RVZYZay8c=; b=blrhaOPCIx5oTqzT/eIsYqu2J3Yw3Reb7e0zUqy3Q3YBQfRlji6VePqzOSPvCY4I7P u1Buf3FxROxgVyKhFV7zLyYbfyEuSehhMNOSJXNvFTW63tOYzlVqaEYEupwNBtqgXWHj SWaJN4y9XEKncepPCEBnVHtwRdiJs05AuzMzw= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:sender:date:x-google-sender-auth:message-id:subject :from:to:content-type; b=hb6dNBQuaOySCtnyHduDs3Nvo2qqppTsHM93S7R/qY8lXePBNWLikjp1pcIVliOPgZ X0gkg9dL3dLV9940GxnJfJyP260OhQQn+N7oMguZmP1e1BYa1ruD0ZkEpI/PWyzEPv8g jbe0e+MVJHXmXe/cpJcIksJwKFFBowlZjtV8M= MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.231.11.200 with SMTP id u8mr5640872ibu.151.1292953628870; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:47:08 -0800 (PST) Sender: mdf356@gmail.com Received: by 10.231.172.69 with HTTP; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:47:08 -0800 (PST) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:47:08 -0800 X-Google-Sender-Auth: 29X6VuFRZLvkx5d2tZM5oiwUp8M Message-ID: From: mdf@FreeBSD.org To: FreeBSD Arch Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: Schedule for releases X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:47:09 -0000 I suspect this has been discussed before but I wanted to bring it up again in light of my experience using FreeBSD as the base for a commercial product. Commercial life cycles can be rather long. For me, I started working on porting Isilon's code base to FreeBSD 7.1 in May of 2009, at the time knowing nothing about FreeBSD and extremely little about Isilon's code base. For reference, at the time 7.1 was the most recent RELENG_7 branch, and CURRENT had not yet been cloned into RELENG_8. For various business reasons, at the time we did not want to track CURRENT so settled on a local svn mirror of stable/7 to make pulling patches easier. Fast forward about 9 months and the merge project is complete, and tested, and we're all happy. But FreeBSD has moved on a bit, with 8.1 out any day now. Now fast forward another 6 months, and here we are today, with 7.4 about to come out and EOL the stable/7 branch, and the product based on FreeBSD stable/7 finally hitting GA. My point in all this is that commercial software endeavors can be multi-year efforts. But the support for stable/7 is pretty low now; I noticed over the last year that many MFC's went to stable/8 but not stable/7. So the question: Should FreeBSD support release branches for a longer time period? I am assuming that after 7.4 comes out only security fixes will be going into stable/7. The difficulty with supporting the release comes partly because of KBI/ABI changes. It may be that CURRENT has changed enough that it's just not practical to support a release that was initially cloned 2 1/2 years ago. For various reasons I am hoping that the next merge project we do locally will be to CURRENT, because that makes staying in sync with FreeBSD and returning our code to the community easiest. But making the business case isn't quite as simple. Thanks, matthew