Patrick Dung wrote: > I have read the recent status report. > IMHO, FreeBSD 5-stable is still not as stable as 4.x series. FreeBSD-5 > will have a short livetime when FreeBSD-6 comes. Software version numbering is an inexact science at best, just like logistics. I agree that 4.x is more stable than 5.x is now. However, I suspect people remember issues with 5.0 or 5.1 more clearly than they remember using 4.0 or 4.1. > May someone who work in large companies tell us their experience that > FreeBSD 4 or 5 is installed for servers now, please? Most of my machines are at 4.10 or 4.11. I've got two production systems running 5.3 which have been doing just fine, too, and I'll be building out new machines with 5.x, but I don't plan on replacing a 4.x system unless I need to. (Some of the older boxes I have are getting up there, so I have been migrating services off of the older P2-grade machines onto the new 5.x boxes, especially the ones with IDE rather than SCSI disks.) Anyway, it's useful to change the OS major version # whenever libc or other aspects of the system API change in such a critical fashion that it is advisable to recompile all software for the new OS version. Sure, compatibility shims exist, but system VM takes twice the hit for the standard shared library overhead. However, some people like having a new major release each year, or even prefer the Win98/Win2000/Win2003 naming convention of using yearname as the major version #. I'm not that found of it myself, although I suppose it makes sense for certain inherently time-fragile software like accounting and tax-filing software, or for online encyclopedia's and such. -- -Chuck PS: This thread would be incomplete without a mention of: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/freebsd-versions.htmlReceived on Sun Apr 24 2005 - 18:04:00 UTC
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