challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

[Ivan Voras]

Chris Marlatt wrote:

> The option provided seems like a fairly good compromise to both
> interests. Pick 6.3 (or anything the release team wishes) to support for
> a longer period of time. Keep all other releases to 12 month support and
> continue doing what I believe is some fairly incredible work. I really
> don't see the downside to it. If anything it should reduce the work load
> for the team and let them focus on making considerable progress.
> Especially considering Ken Smith's recent post regarding future release
> schedules.

This is already being done: 6.1 was a "long term support" release.

The topic comes about pretty often. I think it's because people are
still impressed / spoiled by 4.x and wish they had a stable operating
system that's supported for 6+ years (like 4.x had been). I even heard
commercial / embedded companies saying they would use FreeBSD if only
they had a 5+ years run off a branch (which is comparable to what Debian
has, if you allow 3.0 and 3.1 to be "similar enough").

But all is not so bad: consider for example 7.x: 7.0 was released
2008/02, and from Ken's schedule the last release, 7.4 will be released
2009/12, with probable support for maybe 1-2 more years which makes the
whole 7.x generation of the OS officialy supported for 3, maybe 4 years,
which is a lot in fast technology-changing world.

I know long term support is not doable with the resources the project
currently has, but I've been toying with the idea that maybe there's an
opportunity for commercial development here - a company that would
backport security fixes and important driver fixes for ($$$ *
(N-YEAR_OF_LAST_RELEASE)) more years or something.


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