FreeBSD Upcoming Release Dates

mbadolato writes "The following email was sent out by Jordon Hubbbard regarding the upcoming schedule of releases of FreeBSD [...]" Click through for the email. 4.4 is expected in August, and 5.0 as soon as November for the brave.

"The following constitutes the FreeBSD provisional release schedule into mid-2002. The release engineer and the FreeBSD project have always committed to a "best effort" where these dates are concerned and will continue to do so, but all dates are also subject to change without notice given prevailing conditions in the source tree.

2001-04-20: FreeBSD 4.3 released
--
2001-08-20: FreeBSD 4.4 release date
2001-11-11: FreeBSD 5.0 release date [EARLY ACCESS]
2001-12-15: FreeBSD 4.5 release date
2002-03-15: FreeBSD 5.1 release date [GENERAL ACCESS]
2002-04-20: FreeBSD 4.6 release date
2002-07-15: FreeBSD 5.2 release date [BEGIN -STABLE]

The dates for 5.x are particularly SWAGish in nature and I'm sure that a lot of people in -current will scream and jump up and down about a November release date, but all of us here also know that when we wait for a dot-zero to be "ready". It turns into a multi-year debacle, during which time *nobody* is pleased, and we finally end up rushing something out the door at the last minute anyway except that it's rushed because it's overdue and everyone's upset, not because we had an aggressive deadline. 5.0 certainly won't be perfect, nor will it achive all the goals we'd originally envisioned for it, but then that's been true every single time we've done this and somehow we've survived. :)

I'm also proposing that we branch fairly late in 5.x so that we have quite a bit of time to finish a few works in progress, but we still have some time to talk about that. The 4.x schedule should be fairly accurate as it stands since no significant issues are forseen there.

- Jordan"