As most of you know, 5.0-RELEASE was originally scheduled for November 2001, it being our intention to release 5.0 before the end of 2001 without also colliding with the Christmas / New Years holidays. Unfortunately, a lot of the features on the TODO list for 5.0, such as SMPng (next-generation symmetric multi-processing), KSE (kernel scheduler entities) or support for a new architectures like the PowerPC, SPARC64 or IA64 (Itanium) are nowhere close to being complete. Without these features, there's just not a lot of reason for 5.0 to exist in non-snapshot form and it's therefore been decided that rather than release 5.0 prematurely, we're going to give ourselves the time we need to finish it properly. It should also be noted that a lot of the resources which were expected to be available to do this work have either not materialized as expected or have dropped off the face of the earth. There were 15 people (not counting Apple's participating engineers) involved at the SMPng kick-off, for example, yet not a single one of them has been actively involved with the project for the last 6 months, all such work falling to a single engineer (John Baldwin) who was not even present at the first planning meeting. A lot of this is undoubtedly due to the economic down-turn and the decline in resources which various companies have had available to donate to such efforts, but we still have to take this into account in our project planning and that's why the shipping date is going to be pushed ahead as far as it is. This is not a resource problem we're going to overcome in the next couple of months, and slipping just a little bit won't accomplish our goals, it will merely set us up for another slip when the time comes. ***************************************************************************** * The projected ship date for FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE is now November 1st, 2002 * ***************************************************************************** That will give us a full 14 months to finish the various works-in-progress for 5.0-RELEASE and give it the kind of testing it will need to truly be an improvement, from both a performance and a stability perspective, over the 4.x branch. We will continue to ship releases along the 4.x-STABLE branch during the interval, of course, and will be constantly striving to merge our best work from -CURRENT so that the -STABLE branch remains a good place to be. 4.x-STABLE is one of this project's best branches yet and running it is certainly no sacrifice, but we'll be making an extra effort to ensure that staleness doesn't set in during its somewhat extended lifetime. Finally, I hope that the developers working on 5.0-CURRENT don't take this as an excuse to down tools and take a few months off since that will only ensure that we slip again. We've taken on some truly significant challenges with 5.0 and it will take everyone working as hard as they can to both meet this new deadline and release something that lives up to everyone's expectations. Thanks! - Jordan This is the moderated mailing list freebsd-announce. The list contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities, important events and project milestones. See also the FreeBSD Web pages at http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-announce" in the body of the message