RE: 5.0 newbies: FreeBSD's future [was: Re: Tracking -CURRENT]

Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 4:00 PM -0700 2003/04/30, Lucky Green wrote:
[...]
> 	Are you writing this as a member of -core?  Is this the 
> official 
> policy of the FreeBSD project?

I am neither a member of FreeBSD -core nor am I a committer. I have no
official status with the FreeBSD project of any kind. I am merely a user
who happened to notice certain patterns that I suspect may not yet be
universally recognized.

> >  Early-adopters are trying 5.0-RELEASE. It tends to soon 
> become clear 
> > to  them that 5.0-RELEASE does not meet their expectations for 
> > stability.
> 
> 	Not surprising.  But this is not -STABLE, so if they 
> want to try 
> 5.x, they need to be willing to read and follow the -current mailing 
> list, and they should be willing to demonstrate the proper use of the 
> appropriate search tools and archives of -current and -cvs, before 
> posting to this list with a problem.

It may not be surprising to you that an official release version of
FreeBSD is not stable. Nor may this be surprising to the regular readers
of -current. I can assure you, in case this isn't clear from the
question this list has seen over the last few months, that this fact can
come as a surprise to some users that have utilized 4.x FreeBSD in the
past, but are new to 5.0.

I am simply appealing to folks to please go easy on recent 5.0 users. If
it weren't for the fact that FreeBSD just had a major version release,
those questions would go to -stable, or perhaps even -questions. But
since neither -stable nor -questions presently are lists on which
questions about 5.0 tend to find answers, -current is seeing posts from
those that otherwise would not even consider posting to -current.

--Lucky Green