FreeBSD and release engineering [LWN.net]

FreeBSD and release engineering

Posted Feb 2, 2012 11:56 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463)
Parent article: FreeBSD and release engineering

Yes, there is a Problem. We're already thinking of switching to OpenBSD because of that.

FreeBSD is not comparable to Debian or even the Linux-kernel with regards to "by developers, for developers"; because this is a question of scale.

If the driver for an e1000 nic is broken, it will get fixed in Linux, in just about every kernel that anyone might use in production. Because there are so many people working on the Kernel, that the probability is very high that it will trigger someones "I need to fix that"-reflex. Because he might work in a company which indeed still uses kernel 2.6.32.

Not so in FreeBSD. There are a lot less developers, and if these run mostly CURRENT branches, and try to maintain 4 stable releases by the way, it becomes quite clear that this won't work.

They really need to focus on ONE stable distribution with ALL the bugfixes. (I remember a bug we've filed, with patch, for 6.x, that still wasn't incorporated in 8.x ... Yes, it was a quite esoteric bug you only hit when running NFS-servers with huge amounts of users, but still...)

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FreeBSD and release engineering

Posted Feb 2, 2012 14:43 UTC (Thu) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

>>> We're already thinking of switching to OpenBSD because of that.

Strange because, with OpenBSD, you have only a one year support.
Extract from the FAQ : "old releases are typically supported up to two releases back. It takes resources and time to support older versions, while we might like to provide ongoing support for old releases, we would rather focus on new features."