Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 17:11:37 +0200 From: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Old Way Was Better Message-ID: <3F5B4AA9.1000003@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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> For what it's worth, I and a large number of other people I know would > agree. The 5.x releases so far have been VERY badly received with the > people I've spoken to and it's not done FBSD any favours. I seem to > remember something similar happening when we were all running 3.x > >boxes and 4.x started getting releases, but nothing quite like this. Anyways i am one for whom FreeBSD 5.1 works quite well, and i cannot say the same of the latest 4.* series. On my laptop which runs 4.8 things have degraded with respect to what it was around 4.4. After suspend sound doesn't work any more, pcmcia cards are not properly reset, and i am now seeing ATA DMA errors and downgrading to PIO, a thing that never occurred up to 4.7 Why am i ranting about that? i think that the FreeBSD developers work full time on the 5.* series, and that it has diverged so much from the 4.* series that they commit errors when backporting stuff from Current. You have only to look at the recent PAE merging fiasco to attest of that. The 5.* series began several years ago, and we cannot reasonably ask that the developers remember what is in the 4.* code. The net result is that both the 4.* and the 5.* series are presently more unstable than stable. In my opinion, the 4.* series should not have been maintained so long (except for security fixes), it stresses too much the available developer workforce. Choices have been made for the 5.* series, good or bad, this is not the point, it is urgent to concentrate on that, and only that. Otherwise you can be assured that Linux will draw circles around what will remain of FreeBSD. Matt Dillon disagreeed with these choices and is developing his own version starting from FreeBSD-4. The future will show what were the good choices, but at present, concentrating on 4.* is suicide.
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