Support for FreeBSD 4.11 is going to end sometime in late January. Originally, FreeBSD 6.2 was supposed to be released back in October. This would have given everyone about 3 months to stress test everything and migrate all their boxes from 4.11 direct to 6.2. Now it is near the end of December, and FreeBSD 6.2 RC2 has yet to be seen anywhere. Chances are that FreeBSD 6.2 Release will come out earliest mid-January. This does not give much time for people to migrate to the newest FreeBSD release. I think it would be fair if support is extended for a few more months especially since 6.2 is so late in coming.
John Smith wrote:> Support for FreeBSD 4.11 is going to end sometime in late January. > Originally, FreeBSD 6.2 was supposed to be released back in October. This > would have given everyone about 3 months to stress test everything and > migrate all their boxes from 4.11 direct to 6.2.You've had three months to stress test 6.2-BETA1, 6.2-BETA2, 6.2-BETA3, and 6.2-RC1. We release these for a reason, you know.> Now it is near the end of > December, and FreeBSD 6.2 RC2 has yet to be seen anywhere. Chances are that > FreeBSD 6.2 Release will come out earliest mid-January. This does not give > much time for people to migrate to the newest FreeBSD release. I think it > would be fair if support is extended for a few more months especially since > 6.2 is so late in coming.Your opinion has been noted. Colin Percival
Community support will continue on the freebsd-eol mailing list, fwiw. However, note that we have dropped the requirement for ports maintainers to make their ports work on 4.X, although many continue to do so. It is simply too much for the ports team to support 3 major branches and one development tree (as per previous discussions). mcl
On Dec 21, 2006, at 1:35 AM, Colin Percival wrote:>> Now it is near the end of >> December, and FreeBSD 6.2 RC2 has yet to be seen anywhere. >> Chances are that >> FreeBSD 6.2 Release will come out earliest mid-January. This does >> not give >> much time for people to migrate to the newest FreeBSD release. I >> think it >> would be fair if support is extended for a few more months >> especially since >> 6.2 is so late in coming. > > Your opinion has been noted.FreeBSD 6.1 is a very nice stable release and has been out for a long time. You could migrate to that, too.
John Smith wrote:> Support for FreeBSD 4.11 is going to end sometime in late January. > Originally, FreeBSD 6.2 was supposed to be released back in > October. This would have given everyone about 3 months to stress > test everything and migrate all their boxes from 4.11 direct to > 6.2. Now it is near the end of December, and FreeBSD 6.2 RC2 has > yet to be seen anywhere. Chances are that FreeBSD 6.2 Release will > come out earliest mid-January. This does not give much time for > people to migrate to the newest FreeBSD release. I think it would > be fair if support is extended for a few more months especially > since 6.2 is so late in coming.As has been stated many times, the issue here is not one of "fairness," or any other theoretical concern. The issue is one of resources, and the resources to continue supporting 4.11 are not there. That said, there is nothing preventing anyone that needs to from stress testing the RELENG_6_2 branch right now, in fact we encourage people to do so! The only thing going into that branch right now are small fixes, so you can be reasonably sure that what you're testing now will be very close to what 6.2-RELEASE will look like. Obviously it would be better if you tracked the -stable and cvs-src mailing lists while doing your testing, but if you're in the position you describe it's probably better that you do that anyway. hth, Doug -- This .signature sanitized for your protection
In response to "Michael R. Wayne" <wayne@staff.msen.com>:> Private reply. Not interested in trolling or becoming a troll... > > On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 09:58:11AM -0500, Bill Moran wrote: > > > > Are the people making this argument unaware that 6.1 and 5.5 have been > > at release status for quite some time, and thus have been providing > > ample opportunity to upgrade for some time now? > > 4.11 is rock solid. 5.5 and 6.1 both have problems to the point > that we can NOT roll them out on production machines. EVERY machine > we run those releases (or any 5.x or 6.x release) will hang or > reboot at random. And it's not hardware - we take a machine that > was happily running 4.11, "upgrade" it, suffer problems, reformat and > reinstall 4.11 and the machine is one again solid. > > So, 4.11 is unsupported, 5.5 and 6.1 are simply unusable and 6.2 > is not released. Is is any wonder we are begging for extended > support on 4.11? If 6.2 is as bad as 6.1, we're screwed.Don't know why you sent this to me privately. First off, we're running 5.5, 6.1 and 6.2 all over the place and have zero stability problems. Secondly, how many PRs have you filed regarding these problems? If you've found legitimate issues with the OS, the _correct_ thing to do is help the developers resolve the issues, not clamour about why there aren't enough resources to maintain a system that's old, old, old. -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc.
Jeff Rollin
2006-Dec-22 06:23 UTC
Fwd: Communicating with the public (was Re: Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@gmail.com> Date: 22-Dec-2006 13:18 Subject: Re: Communicating with the public (was Re: Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support) To: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> The point being that you really have to use The Big Hammer to get your> point across. It's the same reason we have to see a McDonalds > commercial _every_single_commercial_break_! (egad I hate McDonalds)Erm, no. We really /don't/! ;-) Anyway ... in most of the F/OSS communities I'm involved with, we're> under the mistaken idea that we can make an announcement and people will > see/hear it. Usually you have to make an announcement 6 or 7 times, > worded differently each time, before it really hits home with the masses. > > I could be wrong, but I get the impression that this whole EOL issue with > 4.x is partly a result of not reminding people when the EOL date for 4.x > is every 5 minutes. The result is that it's just hitting home for a lot > of people now that it's the 11th hour. > > -- >That would suggest that we either need to pay PR/advertising people for their work, or get "volunteer advertisers" as excited about our projects as we are. Or both My ?0.02 Jeff -- Now, did you hear the news today? They say the danger's gone away But I can hear the marching feet Moving into the street Adapted from Genesis, "Land of Confusion" http://latedeveloperbasketcase.blogspot.com
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@gmail.com> Date: 22-Dec-2006 14:26 Subject: Re: Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support To: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> On 22/12/06, Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> wrote:> > > Because everybody knows that odd numbered releases aren't stable. > > I've been 20 years in electronics & comouting and thats the first > time I have ever heard anyone say that! Steer clear of '.0' releases > is well known, but suspecting something just because of the odd or > evenness of it's numbering scheme seems like pure superstition. > > Especually since we are Unix people, and the two of the > 'biggies' in history are Version 7, System 5 ;-) > > Personally I took that as a joke...Jeff -- Now, did you hear the news today? They say the danger's gone away But I can hear the marching feet Moving into the street Adapted from Genesis, "Land of Confusion" http://latedeveloperbasketcase.blogspot.com
Helge.Oldach@atosorigin.com
2006-Dec-22 08:39 UTC
Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support
Pete French <> wrote on Friday, December 22, 2006 2:44 PM:>> Because everybody knows that odd numbered releases aren't stable. > > I've been 20 years in electronics & comouting and thats the first > time I have ever heard anyone say that! Steer clear of '.0' releases > is well known, but suspecting something just because of the odd or > evenness of it's numbering scheme seems like pure superstition.The odd/even rule is just over-generalization, derived from the Linux kernel numbering scheme. Personally, I've been upgrading lots of servers from 4-STABLE to 5-STABLE to 6-STABLE without trouble. Yes, it is some amount of work (particularly if you want UFS2 benefits and thus have to newfs all filesystemes), but it is absolutely doable and certainly not a killer job. Of course upgrading hundreds, even thousands of remote servers is a different task. But then you want professional support anyway... Frankly, I can't follow the argument that 6.x is "unstable". After all, it's named 6-STABLE for a reason. I'd say from experience that the reason is perfectly valid. Actually I have two older servers that got "just stuck" every few weeks with 4-STABLE and 5-STABLE and called for a hard reboot -- these two have been rock solid ever since they were upgraded to 6-STABLE. Greets, Helge
On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 06:45:04AM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:> (2) The ports team will no longer work really hard (tm) to keep ports > working there. They will keep building packages, etc.To clarify, we will be building 4.X packages as time and resources permit. Fixing problems that show up there will no longer be a high priority. As a reminder, the ports tree is not branched, so any changes to update a port will also affect 4.X, whether or not these changes are "improvements" with respect to it. As a point of curiosity, I would like to hear from some of the people in this thread who will continue to run 4.11 or 4-STABLE for a while, to find out what ports they are relying on. A note about whether you consider security updates to be a critical issue would be interesting. I will summarize to the list. Note: I am only interested in the data for machines used as servers. Workstation users only have one real choice: to upgrade to 5.5 or 6.1/6.2. Since the GNOME team no longer supports 4.X, and most desktop environments wind up using some part of GNOME, using 4.X as a desktop is no longer supported. mcl
On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 06:59:16AM -0600, Mark Linimon wrote:> As a point of curiosity, I would like to hear from some of the people in > this thread who will continue to run 4.11 or 4-STABLE for a while, to find > out what ports they are relying on. A note about whether you consider > security updates to be a critical issue would be interesting. I will > summarize to the list.Security updates for ports are the second question only. The first is maintaining Makefile syntax compatibility, take a look at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=java/106964 for example. Besides problem noted in the PR, jdk15 builds and runs tomcat5 just fine for 4-STABLE. Perphaps, RELENG_4 needs an update for its /usr/bin/make. As for important ports, there is clamav antivirus and all ports it depends on. Also Squid, MySQL server & client, net-snmp, zebra/quagga routing daemons, cvsup/cvsupd/cvsup-mirror/cvsweb etc, Apache, sudo... Security updates are, basically, the only important thing for legacy systems IMHO. Eugene Grosbein
It's Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 12:00 . I'm in a small dim room with doors labeled "Dungeon" and "Forbidden". There is noise, the door marked Dungeon flies open and freebsd-stable-request@freebsd.org SHOUTS:> Message: 5 > Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:43:54 +0000 > From: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> > Subject: Re: Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support > To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, lofi@freebsd.org > Message-ID: <E1Gxkgk-0009V0-0j@dilbert.ticketswitch.com>> > Because everybody knows that odd numbered releases aren't stable.> I've been 20 years in electronics & comouting and thats the first > time I have ever heard anyone say that! Steer clear of '.0' releases > is well known, but suspecting something just because of the odd or > evenness of it's numbering scheme seems like pure superstition.> Especually since we are Unix people, and the two of the > 'biggies' in history are Version 7, System 5 ;-)And as system V progressed it got funkier and I moved the servers at an ISP I was part of back in the mid-90s from a 1/2 dozen or so SGI machine to FreeBSD and I felt I was back home again - as it was so similar to the System III based/derived systems I learned on. My first pass at Sys V was on and AT&T 3B2-310, and so many things were far slower than what came before, and some of their programs were so poor in execution it was a pain. I once did a simple benchmark and on an old Z80 based system I was getting times in under 10 seconds in the C test and under 1 minute in the BASIC version. On the 3B2 the program seemed to hang in BASIC. I ran it again and then broke out and looked at the variables. I was aghast when I mentally computed that the program would take an hour to run. The C version ran in a bit under 5 minutes. I will say that the 5.3 things got a bit better but not long after that most of the smaller and the ones that seemed to have decent support disappeared and left us with only a handful of SysV companies. And then there is the classic 1.0 release of NeXTStep. It was pretty stable, considerning the last release before 1.0 was 0.99. Jobs got a lot of press on that one :-)> -pete.Bill -- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
> > But kernel panic issues are being fixed right up to the last > > minute in the 6.2 release train (these and em and socket change > > issues are probably what has delayed the final 6.2). There is a > > lot of work getting done, but clearly a lot of work to do. I wonder > > if this is an area where the Foundation can do something. FreeBSD > > needs someone to troubleshoot all of the panics and LOR issues. > > Bug hunting is no fun (for most), and no one is going to do it. > > Actually, I raised hell when the decision was made to release 6.1 > when it was KNOWN that there were bugs. ISTR that the response > was "we gotta ship and can't be bothered to hold up the schedule > to fix bugs." I admit that at that point I pretty much gave up.... First of all, knowing their are bugs, and finding bugs are not the same. Just because you know you can cause a panic under some circumstance, does not translate into a fix. It might take 2 to 3 weeks of work to find the cause of that panic. But this is the problem, everyone just bails out when they see a bug. As I stated, almost no one is really looking for bugs. There are lists of bugs all over the place. But where are the back traces? Where is the analysis? But instead, more postings to the mailing list. Unless more people start trying to re-create these panics, and post usable data to the lists. It is not insane that releases are being made (like 6.1) with some known panic conditions. It is insane that this situation just generates more content-free e-mails to the mailing lists. Tom
Mark Linimon wrote: As a point of curiosity, I would like to hear from some of the people in this thread who will continue to run 4.11 or 4-STABLE for a while, to find out what ports they are relying on. A note about whether you consider security updates to be a critical issue would be interesting. I will summarize to the list. ***** One of the earlier posts just about covered it. Let's keep security fixes, and the core Mail, Webserver and maintenance programs. Postfix, Clamav, Amavisd-new,Spamassassin,courier,apache1.3,php, mysql, cvsup-without-gui,... Midnight Commander is handy too! -- Kindness can be infectious - try it. Graham North Vancouver, BC www.soleado.ca
seems there are many machines at freebsd.org network are still using 4-STABLE now. http://www.freebsd.org/internal/machines.html
On Fri, Dec 29, 2006 at 08:45:03AM +0800, lveax wrote..> seems there are many machines at freebsd.org network are still using > 4-STABLE now.There is a mix of versions in use, upgrading is done at the discretion of the admins team that controls the FreeBSD.org server farm. That in turn is dependent on the amount of time admins have available etc etc. So what is the problem? -- Wilko Bulte wilko@FreeBSD.org