From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 21 11:37:50 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 789CD16A425; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:37:50 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from marcolz@stack.nl) Received: from mailhost.stack.nl (vaak.stack.nl [131.155.140.140]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B8A3F43D8C; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:37:38 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from marcolz@stack.nl) Received: from hammer.stack.nl (hammer.stack.nl [IPv6:2001:610:1108:5010::153]) by mailhost.stack.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id A2F50A3088; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:37:37 +0200 (CEST) Received: by hammer.stack.nl (Postfix, from userid 333) id 822696462; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:37:37 +0200 (CEST) Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:37:37 +0200 From: Marc Olzheim To: Robert Watson Message-ID: <20050721113737.GB52753@stack.nl> References: <1121917413.4895.47.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20050721113927.T97888@fledge.watson.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="mojUlQ0s9EVzWg2t" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050721113927.T97888@fledge.watson.org> X-Operating-System: FreeBSD hammer.stack.nl 5.4-STABLE FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE X-URL: http://www.stack.nl/~marcolz/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Cc: Alexey Yakimovich , freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Quality of FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:37:50 -0000 --mojUlQ0s9EVzWg2t Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Robert, First, thank you for your clear reply. > 90% of useful FreeBSD testing happens when large FreeBSD consumers take= =20 > release of FreeBSD and deploy them in their testbeds and real-world=20 > environments, and find the bugs through the application of high levels of= =20 > load and obscure hardware configurations. This is why later FreeBSD=20 > releases along a -STABLE branch are typically much more stable than=20 > earlier ones -- the code has run on millions of machines for untold=20 > amounts of load, instead of the thousand or so with a very selected load= =20 > it's likely to run on during development. This is how all software=20 > vendors work, really -- be it Microsoft, or Apple, old-style UNIX vendors= ,=20 > or any of the Linux vendors. Some set of users sits on the bleeding edge= =20 > and shakes out the early problems, and then the rest of the user base=20 > suffers through the later versions to shake out more subtle problems that= =20 > gradually get resolved. Indeed. That's why my company started taking FreeBSD 5.3 in use for production servers when it was out. Since then numerous bugs were fixed, some of which reported by us. Now that we're X bug fixes later in time and started to get a good feeling about the number of open problems, it is extremely annoying to hear the "This will (probably) not be fixed in 5.x" statements. That conflicts with 'gradually get resolved'. What do you recommend larger consumers to do ? Keep using FreeBSD 4 and start testing FreeBSD 6.x, dropping 5.x all together ? I know FreeBSD 5 was a strange exception in the relase scheduling and that a lot has been learned from it for the future and I'm certainly not unthankful for all the work that's done, but I'd like a clear answer on what to do now in regard to taking FreeBSD 5 into 'real' production... Marc --mojUlQ0s9EVzWg2t Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFC34kBezjnobFOgrERAu11AJwJGySJQ46LdwYlazPvDXHks2bM8gCeP9h5 tMpOESxL4t1gbs6mzYjdV0k= =D3sJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --mojUlQ0s9EVzWg2t--