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.

Comments

Re:time-based releases a bad-thing(tm)?

[ArbitraryConstant]

That could potentially be an issue, but it's also possible for a group of developers to work on their own branch, bringing in changes from CURRENT from time to time. SMP on OpenBSD took longer than the 6-month release interval, so there was a seperate SMP branch until the work was close enough to completion to make it into a release.