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:RTFA -- It's Quite Interesting

[ulib]

TFA is really worth reading. And, as you say, moving to scheduled releases is a very good idea: even if 4.10 for production use is still very good in most cases, I think users are going to appreciate releases at more regular intervals.
For all that they've done and all that they'll do, kudos to the FreeBSD team!
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Time Based releases work

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Kudos

[molnarcs]

I just want to express my deep respect for FreeBSD developers. All the hype is around linux these days, and rightly so: it is a wonderful system. But few know that there are now ~100 paid developers working on linux (which is 'just' a kernel) at any given time, while there are none in FreeBSD. Yes, yes, PHK now is payed to do FreeBSD-only development for 8-10 months. There are others who receive either support from their employers to work on FreeBSD part-time, or some grants or others, but all in all, the FreeBSD project has 1/100 of the resources linux has.

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!

Re:Kudos

[molnarcs]

Yeah, you might be right, I haven't thought of that from this perspective. Still, a bit more resources (necessary hardware for testing/writing drivers, at least a handful of developers working full time on FreeBSD wouldn't hurt :)).

One thing they should do is to update the Foundations website. Advertise. Make donating easier and more compelling. An outdated website is not a good incentive to contribute. The best thing would be if they could achieve steady funding. I'm just a student, and my monthly budget is 76000HUF (~380$). Hungary is cheap, so that's OK, but it isn't much (it just covers my monthly expenses, it is not enough to save up), yet I think I could afford a monthly 5$ to help them. But I would only do that if I saw a very well organized 'campaign' to do that. A professional, easy to use website, specific goals (target amount for each month), way to track it, publicity, publicity, publicity. I think it would even be worth for the project to pay someone to organize this (let's say he or she would get x% of the income). I also think that income should be calculable.

In other words, this 'campaign' (I'm looking for a better expression, english is not my native language!) should focus on getting to those who are willing to contribute (even very small amounts, like 5$) for a set amount of time (6-12-x months) - thus to make the 'income' as a said, predictable.

Just an idea...

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

[Eivind Eklund]

I'm a FreeBSD developer.

Our experience, after doing this for 10 years (I personally have been a developer for 7.5 years) is that we get serious problems whenever we try to go feature based, because we get wrong priorities, and it end up with releases taking too long and there being less feature development overall.

This is why we want to switch back to a time based release cycle. We have had long discussions about this (there have been hundreds of messages debating various issues around it), and the overall result is that we believe things get better in close to every way with time based releases, based on what happens in practice.

As we introduce fairly major features reasonably often, there will be major features introduced to releases. We just stop promising major features that are not yet implemented in a particular release. If there were nothing major new, we wouldn't bother with the work of cutting a new -stable branch.

Eivind.