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

[Kostik Belousov]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 02:41:32PM +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 2008/6/7 Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com>:
> 
> > Not only is this wrong, but it completely misses the point.  Why should Jo
> > have to upgrade to find out if his servers will fail under the conditions
> > already articulated in existing, unresolved PRs that affect hardware that he
> > is presently using?  That's a bit like saying, "Buy this new car.  Sure it
> > has bugs that could easily directly affect you, but what's the chance you'll
> > encounter them?  in the off chance that they do, then you can help us
> > resolve them."
> 
> The software is Free. The car was Bought (or suggested to be bought.)
> 
> Re-visit the analogy with a free car that a friend wants to give you.
> (Car analogies suck.)
> 
> 
> > Trust me.  From a server admin's perspective, a bug affects you if it exists
> > in hardware you use.  Whether or not you're actually using the OS is
> > completely irrelevant.  Upgrading to the OS would be foolhardy.  Even
> > testing it on a handful of boxes will not prove that it won't fail under
> > load in production.  Anyone who has done testing knows it can only simulate,
> > not duplicate, the conditions under which production servers run.  I
> > personally have experienced catastrophic failures after extensive testing
> > that revealed no problems.
> 
> You're using free software. This translates to "lots of people have
> put in a lot of effort to provide something to the community which
> they can use, at no cost, if it suits them."
> 
> As said before, the reason FreeBSD isn't supporting older 6.x releases
> anymore is because there's just no manpower to do so.
I want to correct this statement. We do support 6.x releases, but do
this exactly in the form of RELENG_6 and further releases from this
branch, that are in fact snapshots with more quality engineering applied
then usual.

A lot of the work put on the RELENG_6 is the support, i.e. bug fixes and
quite conservative feature merges.

Comparing us with, e.g., Solaris, we would not find a lot of difference
in the support model. Althought they formally provide patches for
Solaris 10 FCS, after patching you find youself running on the same
kernel as the Solaris 10 u5 or later. There could be an argument of
more granularity of the patches then the whole release, but inter-patch
dependencies again make the difference almost non-existent, IMHO.
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