Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD Looks Ahead to 6.0
I was catching up on mailing list archives when I came across an announcement from Scott Long of FreeBSD's release engineering team, noting that after the rather substantial amount of time that it took to take FreeBSD 5 to a -STABLE designation, their release schedule will be speeding up in the future. With the official release of FreeBSD 5.3 coming Real Soon Now, a new branch for 6.0 is now tentatively scheduled for mid-2005. It would seem that while the version numbers may increase more rapidly, so will the rate at which new features are merged from -CURRENT, so end users can get new features faster.
BSD lives!
- Move to a timeline-based release cycle rather than feature-based.
- Development of major features in Perforce. The goal is to keep the head branch from going unstable very often and allows major features to stay under development if it isn't ready for -STABLE branch point. Appears CVS will still be used for the main tree.
- Frequent scheduled releases will keep the bug count under control.
- Current plan is to branch for 6-STABLE in the May/June 2005 time frame with 6.1/.2 etc in 4-6 month intervals thereafter.
Two very big, interesting changes. Given the very usable ports tree moving to scheduled releases for the core system makes a lot of sense. The decision to move development of major features out of the main CVS tree compliments the scheduled-release strategy. If anyone can make it work it'll be the FreeBSD team.Congratulations on achieving 5-STABLE and best wishes on 6-CURRENT development!
[nt]
With feature based release you get the pressure to get things done because everyone is waiting for you. I'm worried that with time-based releases a lot of features will languish with tweaking or becoming more and more ambitious and they'll never get finished to be merge since there is no pressure. I'd rather see feature-based for at least one majour feature in a release. In other words keep it feature-based but bite off only a little (and not more than chew) and aim for that bite to be doable in 9-13 months (to leave for debugging, testing, etc.).
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
This model seems similar to the one used by OpenBSD. It seems to have worked very well for OpenBSD; Hopefully the FreeBSD team will have similar results.
I use FreeBSD heavily in my environment, and have been stuck on 4.x while waiting for some of the 5.x features (mainly UFS2's spiffy snapshots. While not has fast as WAFL's, still spiffy).
I also use a pair of OpenBSD boxen as my firewall cluster. I have to say from an end user standpoint, I am far more pleased with the OpenBSD release cycle. I know in 6 months there will be a new rock solid stable release, so I can plan accordingly.
From a purely PHB POV, IMO having published firm release cycles can help push OSS into the corporate world. Commercial software claims to have this advantage already, but just look at Longhorn and Solaris 10...
what does mean? anyone? does this mean that 5.4 will be released shortly after 5.3 or that a patch will appear or that...?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
..But do you know who you're listening to?
"sold nearly 2,000 copies of my beta system"..
"remove assholes like x and y from the team".. "I made money off *my* work"..
"it's not usable in a production environment, not without my patches"..
"they won't be getting my patches unless I see public apology from a and b"..
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Mr. Hawkins,
I'm one of your 2.000 customers.
I know you enjoy trolling on slashdot, but we kinda need some assistance here.
We deemed you trustworthy enough to buy 2.000 copies of your *beta* system - a decision that has been very easy for us to make, since you're such a reliable person and such a skillful programmer - but enough is enough.
We paid you a lot of money. I have no doubt that *your* HawkinsOS is worth every penny, and that these BSD alternatives are just pieces of junk since they don't have your "patches", but now it's time to come back to work.
Sincerely,
Mr. Joe Moron
HawkinsOS user
Who modded this cheap copy & paste up?
For your info, the original article was by Paul Webb, and it was pulled because it contains lots of factual errors. It's a troll, mod down.
--
HawkinsOS, for the BSD hacker in you.
Mr. Hawkins,
I'm one of your 2.000 customers.
I know you enjoy trolling on slashdot, but we kinda need some assistance here.
We deemed you trustworthy enough to buy 2.000 copies of your *beta* system - a decision that has been very easy for us to make, since you're such a reliable person and such a skillful programmer - but enough is enough.
We paid you a lot of money. I have no doubt that *your* HawkinsOS is worth every penny, and that these BSD alternatives are just pieces of junk since they don't have your "patches", but now it's time to come back to work.
Sincerely,
Mr. Joe Moron
HawkinsOS user
HawkinsOS, for the adult in you.
Oh the irony. Your post is nothing but a childish cheap shot.
OpenBSD already does this and it shows. Things get introduced into the tree and gradually grow to perfection between releases, with snapshots regularly giving users a chance to test and give feedback. Theo gets angry if the current tree won't compile for more than 20 minutes.
It allows gradual changes to happen, I can only remember one "flag day" when the binaries went from a.out to ELF format. Everything else has been pretty gradual. I happen to like installing snapshots, and have found them to be pretty stable, stable as a rock in my experience.
Kudos to FreeBSD for going this route. It will mean wider exposure. The one problem is regular upgrades and supporting past releases. If it took 4 years to get 5 ready for stable, in that time OpenBSD has had 8 releases (one every 6 months). Noone has the resources to support all the old releases, so they only support the past two releases.
Now if all the *BSDs will continue to cooperate, and maybe spread the release dates out so each can share in the publicity we can have a release each quarter. Of course I didn't notice the schedule of release dates, maybe FreeBSD will choose to release every 9 months, or 72 weeks or biennially or whatever.
The FreeBSD 5.3 RELEASE version looks like it just came out this morning and is being mirrored accross the FreeBSD FTP servers at the following address:h andbook/mirrors-ftp.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
I have already downloaded and installed it. In addition, I set up a BitTorrent tracker for 5.3-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso temporarily at the following URL:
http://209.6.188.15:6969/
Mr. Hawkins,
I'm one of your 2.000 customers.
I know you enjoy trolling on slashdot, but we kinda need some assistance here.
We deemed you trustworthy enough to buy 2.000 copies of your *beta* system - a decision that has been very easy for us to make, since you're such a reliable person and such a skillful programmer - but enough is enough.
We paid you a lot of money. I have no doubt that *your* HawkinsOS is worth every penny, and that these BSD alternatives are just pieces of junk since they don't have your "patches", but now it's time to come back to work.
Sincerely,
Mr. Joe Moron
HawkinsOS user
Does RAID-1 work though? Coz that's all I need....
HawkinsOS, for the petulant child in you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If all you need is RAID-1 one you might just use ccd(4) or gmirror(8).
--
HawkinsOS: kicking Smorgrav in the ass since 2004.
HawkingOS?
HawkinSOS?
I bet these kind of mistakes keep you up at night.
Of course, I realize that from a user/technical standpoint, this means nothing. But there are too many trolls out here who are bent on conducting a smear campaign against FreeBSD developers, going even as far as to question their programming skills. Now think about this: these developers have kept up with the pace linux development dictates with 1/100 of the resources linux development has. It is still one of the most reliable operating systems out there, no matter what disgruntled HawkinsOS guys will tell you about FreeBSD not being 'enterprise ready.' In fact, if you check netcraft's monthly reports about the most reliable sites, 4-5 sites from the top 10 is always running FreeBSD. In october, the top three sites having the fewest failed requests all ran FreeBSD (the 4th is Net~ or Open~).
So I just can't emphasize enough how impressed I am (as a desktop user btw) with the work of these guys. And now this announcment! Excellent ideas there! And I hope to see ULE allowed in -STABLE again soon :))) (did I say I was a desktop user?).
Thanks guys ... for everything!
How many enterprise ready operating systems have you written?
And I see that you've written *none*! All you've done is take FreeBSD and tweak it bit here and there. That is a much different thing from writing an operating system.
Maybe my only claim to fame is homebrewing software (not counting the real time embedded systems software I do at work), but at least I'm secure enough not to feel the need to engage in casting puerile aspersions at my competitors.
An error occurred while loading http://www.hawkinsos.com/
I was going to look up what "several fortune 100 companies" were using HawkinsOS, but apparently the demand is so high it's swamped your server.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Perforce is stable, fast, and well-tested. I don't see how using a great tool is a handicap, even for an open-source project.
Someone should submit this as a full /. story,
BTW, what is the point of hiding behind AC but always posting the same paranoid drivel?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Mr. Hawkins,
I'm one of your several Fortune 100 customers.
I know you enjoy trolling on slashdot, but we kind of need some assistance here.
We deemed you trustworthy enough to make our Fortune 100 company migrate to your OS - a decision that has been very easy for us to make, since you're such a reliable person and such a skillful programmer - but enough is enough.
We paid you a lot of money. I have no doubt that *your* HawkinsOS is worth every penny, and that these BSD alternatives are just pieces of junk since they don't have your "patches", but now it's time to come back to work.
Sincerely,
Mr. Joe Moron
HawkinsOS user
Fortune 100 company CEO
You're getting rather pathetic... 1) Gvinum works and the RAID5 bug have been fixed in 5-STABLE stoopido! Anyone who is advanced anough to use RAID5 and vinum knows how to fix this issue by updating to latest 5-STABLE! 2) ULE patches are available that fixes things as well. If you feel the need to use ULE just grab'em or wait until ULE is MFC'd. Now please be so kind to eat shit or release those patches that you "claim" to have. If you even have anything... In your case, seeing is believing and we ain't seen nothing but whining yet from you. So either you put up or you STFU!
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
This one has been impacting me for quite some time.
I presume he took the web site down before he posted for exactly that reason. The web site admits this supposed OS doesn't exist. ``under development'', ``release delayed'' etc.
The action packed ``community'' area of his site is worth a visit too. All those beta testers exchanging knowlegable comments...
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named