FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Julian Elischer]

On 1/17/12 9:36 AM, Damien Fleuriot wrote:
>
> On 1/17/12 4:39 PM, Mark Felder wrote:
>> Why is everyone so afraid of running -STABLE? Plenty of stuff gets
>> MFC'd. Yeah, I agree -- running -RELEASE is difficult. Hell, it's
>> frustrating to us that VMWare only supports -RELEASE and it took until
>> ESX 5 to officially support 8.2!
>>
>> More releases / snapshots of -STABLE helps people on physical servers,
>> but anyone who runs VMs on Xen or VMWare won't get any support for those
>> versions because they didn't go through the QA process yet. FreeBSD is
>> increasingly becoming a third world citizen thanks to virtualization
>> efforts being focused on Linux, so I feel that more frequent releases
>> won't help as many people as you think.
>>
> Running FBSD in a *production* environment means you want something
> stable and tested.
>
> -STABLE does not fulfill the requirements I'm afraid.
>
> We've had to downgrade some boxes from 8.2-STABLE to -RELEASE here.

then you went the wrong way
and your process is flawed.

having run -stable on production systems, the way to do it is:

* follow -stable..
* pick a time that IN RETROSPECT (from 1 month later) looks as though 
it was good.
* take a snapshot from that time and test it.
* if it has problems MOVE FORWARD (not back) to the next candidate 
snapshot time.
* repeat until you have one that works for you

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