Picking one of the many posts from the OP in this thread... On Wed, 04 Jun 2008, 22:33 -0700, Jo Rhett wrote: > I am suggesting that given that the current bug list for 6.3-RELEASE > is both (a) too large and (b) breaks things that work fine in 6.2 ... > that I think pushing 6.2 (the real stable release) into EoL is a bit > rushed. I sympathize with the development costs of maintaining old > versions. Again, I will help in any way I can.
It seems to me that the underlying grievance may be lack of faith in the latest RELEASEs; promtping the suggestion that $FAVOURITE_RELEASE support be extended. I believe that the best way to acquire confidence in the FreeBSD RELEASEs is to participate in the release cycles. Those of us who are not developers can make a significant contribution by taking the time to build the BETA and RC builds on our own systems with our own peculiar mix of CPU's, motherboards and peripherals. If we find problems we can feed them back to the team and improve the quality of the release; and then we'll be confident about deploying RELEASE on our systems rather than regarding it with suspicion. > On my return next week I would happily build and provide 6.3-RELEASE > systems for any developer who needs a test environment for reported > bugs that affect hardware I have in my possession. Free boxes, free > bandwidth, power, etc. No problem. Free my time in whatever way I > can help. This is the system which should have been used for building the 6.3 BETAs and RCs. Offering it for others to use for debugging, while a generous gesture and no doubt greatly appreciated, is a bit like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. This will not achieve a better 6.3-RELEASE. The release has already happened. > But until such time as the current bug list for 6.3 hardware reduces > to somewhere less than 100% likelyhood of experiencing failures after > an upgrade, there's just no way I can take our production environment > forward. Going "bravely forward" to guaranteed failure isn't a great > way to enjoy your job :-( Which means I'll be doing our security > patches by hand. Because it may be time intensive, but it's less > likely to cause a production failure. 6.3-RELEASE will never improve. Since the OP emphasised deploying only RELEASEs, I suggest that his effort should go into making sure that 7.1 meets his requirements BEFORE it is released. For the record, I am running 6.3-RELEASE on hosted systems interstate and internationally and have had no problems at all: locally I am running a mixture of 6.3-RELEASE and 7.0-RELEASE with no problem. I hope this discussion provides a catalyst for more of us to become more involved in pre-RELEASE testing to ensure an even higher standard of RELEASEs from the FreeBSD project. -- John Marshall
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