Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity,

On Jan 17, 2012, at 11:12 AM, John Kozubik wrote:
> Again, I'm not suggesting more snapshots - I am suggesting more real, =
bona fide releases.  This will help people.

I tend to agree with you.  Our release engineering process isn't serving =
the needs of users as much as it once did.  When Walnut Creek was =
running release engineering, we had releases often because they wanted =
to make money from their subscriptions.  This produced reasonably spaced =
minor releases and except for 4-5, decently spaced major releases.  Even =
after the torch passed from walnut creek to others, there was still =
either residual pressures to make the releases happen, or inherited =
mindset that keep on the same pace.

Today we have lost our way.  We have no major vendor pushing the process =
along to make it happen faster.  We have no reason to get things done =
faster or differently than the volunteers are doing it.  So we're =
languishing.  9.0 took forever to get out, and we didn't do stop-gap 8.x =
releases.  Our port collection has also gotten bigger since those =
by-gone days so doing a release of the whole ports tree is taking longer =
to QA, so pressure to do it more often meets up with resource =
constraints.  Our binary update tools lag considerably compared to =
Linux, and there's a big reluctance to whole-heartedly embrace PBI as a =
possible solution.  Maybe pkgng will help there.  Maybe the various =
attempts to get ABI stability to allow for easier decoupling of FreeBSD =
base and FreeBSD ports releases.

But we have a real problem here.  One I don't have easy answers for how =
to solve.  One that likely has many other root-causes than the few I've =
cherry picked for this reply.  The underlying balances that allowed the =
early project to succeed have shifted, but we've not shifted with them.

Warner

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