Schedule for releases

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, December 22, 2010 7:38:34 am Ulrich Spörlein wrote:
> On Wed, 22.12.2010 at 09:52:03 +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> > Erik Cederstrand <erik at cederstrand.dk> wrote:
> > > Den 21/12/2010 kl. 23.28 skrev Robert Watson:
> > > > Looking at 7.x, I'm struck by how much it has slowed down.
> > > > There's a significant user community, but not a significant
> > > > developer community. 
> > > 
> > > Which pretty much sums up a dilemma in the development of
> > > FreeBSD, I think. Developers want users to try out their new
> > > shiny stuff, but users don't want to spend time upgrading.
> > 
> > For me, personally, one significant problem is that I don't
> > have the resources to easily run several versions of FreeBSD
> > at home.
> > 
> > I have a stable/8 installation, but I can't easily install
> > another one (i.e. stable/7) at the same time, which would
> > be required for testing and support.  Well, I could set up
> > a dual-boot environment somehow with a second disk, but
> > that's time-consuming and annoying.
> > 
> > I also have to confess that my motivation to spend time
> > supporting an "old" branch is somewhat low because I don't
> > use that branch myself anymore for some time already.
> > Probably quite a few developers are in a similar situation,
> > I guess.
> 
> I think this is the core "problem". Statistics[1] show, that most
> developers run some form of -CURRENT and also have some machines running
> the latest -STABLE tree. So, naturally, no-one is too thrilled about
> testing stuff for the pre-latest -STABLE tree.
> 
> We should not try to have two stable branches overlap for that long. We
> are spreading our resources too thin here.
> 
> CURRENT+STABLE makes sense, always. CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE might be nice
> for vendors, but in the end it's the developers doing the work, and they
> mostly only care about the one of the STABLES. We should not delude
> ourselves into thinking we can easily support two STABLE branches,
> that's just not happening.

Actually, CURRENT+STABLE+STABLE doesn't really work for the vendors either
versus a CURRENT+STABLE where STABLE branches were created less often and
lasted longer.

-- 
John Baldwin