How many "production" releases will FreeBSD have when the ZoL merge comes in ?

[John Kozubik]

Friends,

I am confused as to how the ZFS On Linux merge will be available before 
2022.  The current supported release lifecycle page states:

"11.4-RELEASE + 3 months (or September 30, 2021)"

... and I have heard very pessimistic responses about the ZoL merge going 
into the 12 branch.

So I *think* that one of the following must be true:


- We will, at some point, have *three* production branches with -RELEASE 
distributions:  11, 12 and 13.

- ZoL will actually come into the 12 branch, despite recent pessimism.

- Neither of the above: ZoL comes in the 13 branch, which will not overlap 
with the 11 branch, which means (basically) 2022 as the earliest 
production (-RELEASE) version of FreeBSD with ZoL.


Some background ...


We at rsync.net, which runs exclusively on FreeBSD, are *dying* to get 
native encryption and raw send.  As you can imagine, we can only run 
-RELEASE versions of FreeBSD.

We really want to give Linux users the ability to 'zfs send' to their 
rsync.net accounts like FreeBSD users do, but 13.1-RELEASE[1] is a *long* 
way off - perhaps over three years from now.

Three simultaneous "production" releases seems silly.

So that leaves ZoL coming in the 12 branch as the only outcome that isn't 
terrible news.


I wonder if there is any of the above that I am mistaken about, or some 
news I have missed ?


Thanks,

John Kozubik



[1] In practice, we also don't run x.0 releases in production which sounds 
bigoted and superstitious but I can point to 5.0-RELEASE and you need no 
further explanation.