Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:47:08 -0800 From: mdf@FreeBSD.org To: FreeBSD Arch <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Schedule for releases Message-ID: <AANLkTi=_mHDz3LZ1SAuCsz6kmvqCdZBx3Q5ZTyQQO1%2BP@mail.gmail.com>
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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
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