FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Mark Linimon]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 10:52:44PM +0000, Mark Blackman wrote:
> I suspect poor old RE is putting too much work into BETAs and RCs for
> point releases. 

The counter-argument is that we have a lot more leeway to make mistakes
on a .0 release.  We're not going to be cut any slack at all for shipping
a badly regressed point release.

Some minor regressions are inevitable in software, but they do indeed
need to be minor.

For how we're doing with regressions in general, see:

  http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/prs_for_tag_regression.html

Now, it's true that many of the recent PRs are against 9.0, and many of
the ones that aren't may be stale (certainly most of the pre-2010 ones),
but these are the types of things that users really notice and become
unhappy about.

mcl