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FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year

Posted by timothy on from the measure-twice-cut-once dept.

Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:15 to 1 ? by Nater · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmmm... I've been moderated a troll. Perhaps I should rephrase myself...

    Don't think FreeBSD is impervious to the sort of misconfigurations that you've cited as faults for Linux. A naive user installing any operating system is still a naive user. I have seen in my life exactly one FreeBSD system, and it was r00ted once about three years ago and once within the last year.

    Security is not platform-dependent, it is admin-dependent.

    --

    I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
    "We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer

  2. Not necessarily bad news by dglo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This isn't as bad as it might sound to Linux users.

    FreeBSD has multiple branches:
    * 5.0, aka -CURRENT, currently the target of
    most new development.
    * 4.4, the next release in the 4.x series,
    due to be released today
    * 4.3-RELEASE, which is updated with security
    fixes as necessary
    * 3.x, which is still being used, so it
    occasionally gets a fix or two.

    What this delay means is that the general public won't see most of the nifty 5.0 features until the end of next year.

    That doesn't mean, however, that we won't get *any* new features; the list of 4.4 improvements will be evidence of that...