Where is FreeBSD going?

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> 
> From a practical point of view that has been rapidly breaking down
> over the last 6-12 months.  People need features in 5.x.  Various
> people have decided (for good reason, I'm not questioning the
> decisions) that a large number of features go into 5.x, and because
> of the difficulty in back porting don't go into 4.x.  Indeed, the
> only reason I'm running -current now is I need support for an Atheros
> wireless card.
> 
> The take away I see is that this was too big of a chunk.  The next
> bite planned needs to be smaller.  You can't delay one year or two
> years in a production environment.  New hardware needs drivers in
> that time.  New protocols become production deployed in that time.
> I am also a firm believer that having all the developers focused so
> much on meeting deadlines for all this new complexity leaves them
> out of time to deal with the PR's that have been piling up.

My perspective as a developer is that there were a lot of things
in FreeBSD that needed an overhaul.  SMP for example.  Sure,
it's not perfect and probably still has a ways to go, but
this touched a lot of things.  I fully expected FreeBSD-5 to
get worse before it got better, perhaps lose some folks to
Linux because they couldn't wait for stable -5 features.

Could it have been better managed?  Sure, in a better world
where we had more of our developers getting paid to do this
(we're lucky that we still have a handful or two of them).

> For FreeBSD to appeal to the masses it must install on the latest
> and greatest Dell or Gateway or whatever, which means it must include
> drivers for today's cheaper-by-the-gross parts from China.  Driver
> updates in particular need to be very regular, and in the active
> -STABLE release, which for now means back-ported to 4.x, even if
> that means a complete rewrite because of how different the kernels
> are.  Otherwise people get forced to run 5.x for a few driver issues,
> and then complain like crazy about all the other stuff that's not
> ready for prime time.
> 
> Mom said it best, small bites, chew with your mouth closed.

I understand this position, but I think this step was a
necessary one for the future of the project.

My $.02.