On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Steven Hartland wrote:
I was disappointed to see that 8.3-RELEASE is now slated to come out in
March of 2012. This will be ~13 months since 8.2-RELEASE and is typical of
a trend towards longer gaps between minor releases.
...
I must say as a small company that runs ~200 machines on FreeBSD
I do see where John is coming from, as it is very time consuming to keep
things up to date and new is not always better e.g. we still have boxes
stuck on 6.x as issues introduced in the Linux compat after that caused
problems.
That said I'm in two minds as the features that have been brought in by
the more rapid dev cycle like ZFS have been great.
The features are great - nobody doesn't want the features! Like I said in
the original post, as wonderful as ZFS on FreeBSD is (and we are deploying
it this year) it is only now (well, in March) with 8.3 that I feel it is
finally safe and stable enough to bet the farm on. I'm not the only one
that feels this way.
If that's the case, then, ZFS could have been developed just as it has, in
a development branch, and not been used as justification for (mutiple)
major releases and all of their disruption.
As I said in the original post - we should be on 6.12 right now, and
bringing out 7.0, with ZFS v28.
Where I do see an issue is where it feels like we've just got to a solid
8.2 release with p6 and some addition patches we see things like em driver
updates required to run newer hardware only in 9.
That's a few releases in a row now where "legacy" gets locked out of new
motherboards because of em(4). But I digress...
While we might like to push everything to 9 it brings with it a large
amount of untested changes like the HPN patches to core ssh which we
have seen problems with under openssh-portable when tested.
So this puts us in a dilemma, push to 9 and keep up to date or stick
with 8.2 with custom patches while we wait for 8.3 which we know is
good and assuming it has the patches need included in it?
Exactly. We're in the same boat.
Longer, dedicated lifecycle, extended legacy support, and more frequent
minor releases were my original suggestions. Why not take the "newer
production release" (or whatever 9.0 is) and rename it "development" ?
Why couldn't this change happen today, specifically with 8.x and 9.x ?
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