FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[John Kozubik]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2012, Igor Mozolevsky wrote:

> I was thinking about this and I'm with Andriy on this: such solution
> has no long term potential and will only serve to stagnate the
> innovation. This has been repeated over and over in this thread, but
> it's worth another mention, currently, there are effectively four
> tracks: 7.4, 8.2, 9.0 and -HEAD, which understandably poses a lot of
> difficulty for in terms of maintenance. Whatever historical reason for
> that is, I think a lot of people would agree that this needs changing
> in the near future to have a single -RELEASE branch and a single -HEAD
> branch, but with the understanding by the devs that just because
> -RELEASE has been cut, it doesn't mean that everyone, en mass, drops
> development on that and hops on the -HEAD bandwagon...


And as long as we're repeating ... :)

Since 9.0 is already out of the bag, I think a decent approach would be to 
fizzle out 8.x on the current timeline/trajectory (maybe 8.4 in 6-8 
months, and maybe 8.5 in a year or so), then:

- EOL 7
- mark 8 as legacy
- mark 9 as the _only_ production release
- release 10.0 in January 2017

And in the meantime, begin the every 4-6 month minor releases that we all 
agree can occur with 9.  By Jan 2017, you get to 9.12 or 9.14 or so.

This is nice because no upheaval needs to happen with 7 and 8, and 
interested developers do not get kneecapped vis a vis 9 - they can just 
keep going where they were going with it, and the only real change is that 
10 is pushed out a long ways, and people[1] get to really sink their teeth 
into 9.

[1] *both* developers and end users