FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Julian Elischer]

On 1/16/12 10:20 PM, John Kozubik wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Steven Hartland wrote:
>
>>> I was disappointed to see that 8.3-RELEASE is now slated to come 
>>> out in March of 2012.  This will be ~13 months since 8.2-RELEASE 
>>> and is typical of a trend towards longer gaps between minor releases.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> I must say as a small company that runs ~200 machines on FreeBSD
>> I do see where John is coming from, as it is very time consuming to 
>> keep
>> things up to date and new is not always better e.g. we still have 
>> boxes
>> stuck on 6.x as issues introduced in the Linux compat after that 
>> caused
>> problems.
>>
>> That said I'm in two minds as the features that have been brought 
>> in by
>> the more rapid dev cycle like ZFS have been great.
>
>
> The features are great - nobody doesn't want the features!  Like I 
> said in the original post, as wonderful as ZFS on FreeBSD is (and we 
> are deploying it this year) it is only now (well, in March) with 8.3 
> that I feel it is finally safe and stable enough to bet the farm 
> on.  I'm not the only one that feels this way.
>
> If that's the case, then, ZFS could have been developed just as it 
> has, in a development branch, and not been used as justification for 
> (mutiple) major releases and all of their disruption.
but it would not have gotten the testing it did.

>
> As I said in the original post - we should be on 6.12 right now, and 
> bringing out 7.0, with ZFS v28.

that was my feeling when we went to this "bring out a new major 
release every 3 weeks" scheme.

We must however look at why Major and Minor releases are different.

A major release means that kernel ABIs  (inside the system) have changed.

We needed to change the ABIs between 4 and 5 for sure (threaded 
kernel) and
between 6 and 7 for sure, (second round of threading work).
7 and 8 also really required a change.
I'm not sure about 5-6 and 8-9.