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End Of OpenBSD 3.0-STABLE Branch - Upgrade To 3.2

Posted by Hemos on from the movin'-on-up dept.

jukal writes "From here: "Hello folks, Due to the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.2, the 3.0-STABLE branch will be out of regular maintainance starting december 1st. There will be NO MORE fixes commited to this branch after this day. People relying on 3.0-STABLE (or older releases even) are strongly advised to upgrade to a more recent release (preferrably 3.2 as it becomes available) as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, Miod" Download from your preferred FTP mirror."

5 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. buy it by raffe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, dont download it. Buy it! Support the brave people how work hard to get openbsd to work!

  2. What World Do These People Live In? by disappear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They think that in two months I can take all of my production servers, build replacement boxes, test them, and put the new boxes into production? When the newest release of the OS isn't even available yet? (Why upgrade to the intermediate release when that'll be dropped as soon as the next one comes out...)

    Do they assume I have only one box, or that I don't bother to test things, or that I don't lose any money if the upgrade is perfectly smooth? Do they assume that I won't switch to something with a better support policy (and more notice for dropping support) than what they do?

    Do any of these people know anyone who manages systems for a living, or do they only talk to other developers?

    1. Re:What World Do These People Live In? by almeida · · Score: 3, Insightful

      More notice for dropping support? Isn't there stated policy that they support only the current release and the previous release? Look at the fancy ASCII map of their release schedule. It clearly shows that only two releases are maintained at one time. I've been using OpenBSD since 2.9, and I was always aware of their support scheme. Where have you been?

      Do you assume that they have the resources to support older releases just because it is an inconvenience for your to upgrade? They are offering you a really great OS for free. They work really hard to make sure that it is the best it can be. And what I like most about the OpenBSD team is that they really take a stand for freedom issues in software (read Theo's stance on the Sun ECC code being included in OpenSSL in this message, or check out the entire thread).

      Give these guys a break. You had 6 months to test 3.1 and upgrade your boxes from 3.0. If you don't like their policy, use something else. As someone said over a deadly.org, if you want support for older releases, pay someone to provide patches for your system. Whatever you decide to do, stop complaining about something they give away for free.

    2. Re:What World Do These People Live In? by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 3, Insightful
      the amount of time you get isn't enough for me to use OpenBSD at a customer's site. Eighteen months as the lifespan of a product isn't substantial enough, in my opinion.
      Then, clearly, OpenBSD does not meet your requirements. Try another *BSD or switch to Linux or buy AIX or HP-UX or Solaris or something.

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
  3. Release Cycles are Open Source's major flaw by lamontg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I admin 850 linux boxes, and as far as I am concerned "release early, release often (and provide no support for older versions)" is open source's major flaw. Developers doing it for fun don't want to support old versions. They're lazy. This laziness has been turned around into some kind of virtue by the open source movement.

    What open source needs is a company which provides an 18 month upgrade cycle and supports three concurrent versions. This is exactly what Sun provides with Solaris, and is something that system admins really badly need. And its not just the upgrading issue. You also lose time on the front end of this release cycle because it takes a long time for vendors to certify their software for the new release of the operating system. RedHat is starting to ge some kind of clue about this and is switching to an 18 month release cycle with their advanced server product. They still put on this godawfully stupid dog and pony show though about they'll come in and (for a price) help to upgrade all you machines every time they release a new version. This is entirely unacceptable and waste of resource and a waste of money spent on RedHat. It is basically RedHat trying to turn their laziness into a business model.

    And please don't talk about how you've got a couple of scripts whipped together to make it easy to manage 10 openbsd boxes. I'm on a team that manages *850* open source boxes. Whatever you suggest doing simply doesn't scale well enough to deal with doing 850 upgrades every 6-12 months. An upgrade will take everyone on my team offline for at least a month, and we can't afford to be doing that all the time. Also, the next upgrade we're doing is from RH6.2 to RH7.2. We haven't had the time yet to certify all our software for RH7.3 or RH8.0 so we're actually going to be starting out behind once again... This is how system management works at very large sites though.