Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Kozubik" <john@kozubik.com>
To: <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 10:28 PM
Subject: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

> 
> Friends,
> 
> I was disappointed to see that 8.3-RELEASE is now slated to come out in 
> March of 2012.  This will be ~13 months since 8.2-RELEASE and is typical 
> of a trend towards longer gaps between minor releases.

....

I must say as a small company that runs ~200 machines on FreeBSD
I do see where John is coming from, as it is very time consuming to keep
things up to date and new is not always better e.g. we still have boxes
stuck on 6.x as issues introduced in the Linux compat after that caused
problems.

That said I'm in two minds as the features that have been brought in by
the more rapid dev cycle like ZFS have been great.

Where I do see an issue is where it feels like we've just got to a solid
8.2 release with p6 and some addition patches we see things like em driver
updates required to run newer hardware only in 9.

While we might like to push everything to 9 it brings with it a large
amount of untested changes like the HPN patches to core ssh which we
have seen problems with under openssh-portable when tested.

So this puts us in a dilemma, push to 9 and keep up to date or stick
with 8.2 with custom patches while we wait for 8.3 which we know is
good and assuming it has the patches need included in it?

The correct answer for us is currently unknown and is still being
debated, but in the mean time we are going to keep with 8.2 until
we've had the chance to fully evaluate what 9 has to offer.

    Regards
    Steve

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