Re: Change to FreeBSD release scheduling and support period vs.

On 9/22/24 15:32, Mark Millard wrote:
> https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-announce/2024-July/000143.html
> 
> From: Colin Percival <cperciva_at_FreeBSD.org>
> Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2024 02:16:14 UTC
> 
> lists:
> 
>>          Release EoL
>> 13.3: Mar 2024 Dec 2024
>> .  . .
>> 13.4: Sep 2024 Jun 2025
>> . . .
>> 13.5: Mar 2025 Apr 2026*
>> . . .
>> * 13.5 and 14.6 are supported until 5 years after 13.0 and 14.0 respectively.
> 
> Note the explicit 13.5 release mentions.

Yes.  As the final releases from 13.x and 14.x, those will be supported
for longer than the new release schedule would dictate -- those stable
branches will have 5 years of support vs 4 years from 15.x onwards.

> However, https://www.freebsd.org/security/ makes no mention of 13.5:

Sure, because that page only mentions releases which have happened.  13.5
won't happen until March of next year.

> https://www.freebsd.org/security/unsupported/
> 
> lists:
> 
> releng/13.0 13.0-RELEASE n/a April 13, 2021 August 31, 2022
> 
> and the announcement's wording with "supported until 5 years after
> 13.0" is not explicit about the 2021-April-13 vs. 2022-Aug-31 for
> the start of the 5 years --but the security table suggests the
> 2021-Apr-13 as the start of the about 5 years.

The 5 years starts with the .0 release, which was April 2021.  The
August 2022 date is when 13.0 was EoL.  It's "5 years of support for
FreeBSD 13", not "5 years of support for FreeBSD 13 after 13.0 is
EoL".

> So it looks to me like releng/13.4 possibly should have "Expected
> EOL" listed as something like "13.5-RELEASE + 3 months", much like
> releng/14.1 lists "14.2-RELEASE + 3 months". In other words: it
> probably should mention the next 13.* release number (13.5) in
> some way.

We always used to list "[next release] + 3 months" because we didn't
know when that next release would be.  But now that we have a schedule
of upcoming releases, we don't need to leave it undefined like that.

I should change the releng/14.1 line to say "March 31, 2025".  The 14.2
release will be in December 2024.

-- 
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid