FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday, January 17, 2012 6:41:48 am Ivan Voras wrote:
> (answering out of order)
> 
> On 16/01/2012 23:28, John Kozubik wrote:
> 
> > 2) Having two simultaneous production releases draws focus away from
> > both of them, and keeps any release from ever truly maturing.
> 
> This isn't how things work. The -CURRENT always has (and probably always 
> had and always will have) the focus of developers.

This is not strictly true.  At work we are using 8.2-ish, and so right now
much of development happens on 8 and has to be forward ported to HEAD.  I
do think we are cutting stable branches a bit too often and that we could
merge features back to older branches more aggressively.  SVN had made that
much easier (e.g. merging superpages from 8 back to 7).  However, it is more
work for a developer to merge a change back to 2 or 3 branches (e.g. from
HEAD to 9 to 8 to 7).  Developers are more willing to merge things back to
one or two branches.  Right now we have made a design decision to release
new X.0 releases (and cut new branches) at a certain frequency (and we
aren't even keeping up).  We could choose to alter that design and I think
we would end up with longer-lived stable branches as a result.

-- 
John Baldwin