Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD?

[Mark Linimon]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 07:49:02AM +0700, Erich wrote:
> can you still install the ports tree and its applications on a FreeBSD 4.4?

No.  When 4.11 finally went EOL on 01/31/2007 we removed all the compatiblity
code, because by that time supporting both was increasing the maintenance
burden on our port maintainers (probably in the range of 25%-50%).  This
was due to how much that the src and ports infrastructure had changed
between 4.X and 5.X: different patches had to be kept for each branch, for
instance.  (This has been much less the case since then; 5.X had some very
disruptive changes.)

FWIW, according to my research, 4.4 was released 09/19/2001 and probably
went EOL sometime in 2003:

  http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/schedule/milestones.html

The current status is that we support 8.x and 9.x well.  Ports support
for 7.x is starting to fade over time as new upstream releases rely
on newer APIs.  6.x went EOL 11/30/2010 and we no longer claim to
support it in ports.

> I only see many XP machines at the client side running the latest
> Office applications.

Not to disagree that this is possible, but my own experience (with
Quicken) is that I was finally forced to move off 2K/XP to be able to
continue running their software the way I expect to run it.  Without
doing any research to back up my claims, I think 2K is from the same
timeframe as 4.4.

Please don't take any of the above as criticism.  It's clear that our
model of "everyone must run the current ports tree" failed long ago.
We have some things in progress (pkgng; conversion to SVN, which allows
much cheaper tagging/branching) that are key pieces of being able to
fix this; others are coming.  In the meantime, your criticisms about
this facet are absolutely on-target.

However, for anyone who expects to be able to run current applications
on a 10-year-old OS release, there is no realistic choice other than an
OS from a commercial company where there is a revenue stream to support
a paid support staff dedicated to that task and that task only.

FreeBSD does not have that now and is extremely unlikely to have that
in the future.  For anyone who has that criterion, we're the wrong choice.

mcl