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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