Re: FreeBSD 6.0 and onwards

On Friday 05 November 2004 06:38 pm, Scott Long wrote:
> All,
>
> FreeBSD 5.3 is about to be announced this weekend and will signal the
> true kick-off of the 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT series.  We are very excited
> about this, both because 5.3 is a good release, and because 6.0 will
> give us a chance to, erm, redeem ourselves and our development process
> =-)
>
<snip>
>
> There has been quite a bit of discussion about this over the past week
> by the developer community.  The proposal that I and Poul-Henning have
> set forth is to stop gating releases, both major and minor, or features,
> and instead gate them on a schedule that is both reasonable and timely.
> New -STABLE branched will be made on a calendar-based time line, and
> point releases on those branches will be made at regular intervals.  We
> are still debating the exact time line, but it will fall somewhere
> between doing a new -STABLE branch every 12-18 months, and doing point
> releases every 4-6 months.
Won't branching -STABLE every 12-18 months will be too often?  I'm thinking 
from the perspective of maintaining remote servers, the prospect of 
updating across major versions.  This would also depend on how long 
various branch will stay supported and have security updates.  As you have 
said there won't be a huge 4.x -> 5.x chasm for future releases, but with 
an accellerated release schedule upgradeablity between branches 
particularly doing remote upgrades safely will need to be a priority, 
which is probably a good thing.


-- 
Anish Mistry