Re: Change to FreeBSD release scheduling etc.

On 7/15/24 20:58, Colin Percival wrote:

Hello.
Again, as a foreword, please don't get me wrong, I appreciate your work 
and that of all the team.



>> In short, it takes me about 3 months to catch the surprizes[*] and fix
> 
> While I see your point, we're hoping that having roughly 2x as many minor
> releases will result in at least a 2x reduction in the number of surprises
> per minor release

Unfortunately, that's not all.
Upgrading means rebooting and, while that's something that should happen 
without troubles, it also means that if something goes wrong someone 
might need to take a 200km trip in a hurry.
We usually do these "deep" upgrades when we are at the customer's site, 
but, for some customers, this might happen once/twice a year.



> Extending the minor-release support period might be possible, but that
> would depend on portmgr and secteam and I can't speak for them.  One issue
> which would certainly come up is kernel module packages -- our packages
> are built for each stable branch on the oldest currently supported release,
> which means that e.g. new features in 14.1 can't be used until 14.0 is EoL;
> this is a problem particularly for graphics drivers.

Since we've got our Poudriere system, I'm in no place to speak about 
this issue (although I understand it).



  bye & Thanks
	av.