freebsd stable - Jun 2008 - CLARITY re: challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

Andy Kosela wrote:

... a really beutiful and elaborate post on the subject ...

However, being an ordinary user with few machines running FreeBSD, i
have seen on my limited sample that 2 machines worked better with 6.3
than 6.2 (two old Athlon machines, which work perfectly OK in fact) and
one worked much worse (a P4 which used to be perfectly stable and
suddenly panicked 3 times in a week). So i upgraded this last one to 7.0
and it is now working perfectly well without any trouble. The only
"gotcha" is the slowness of X problem when compiling, but i live with
that.

Moral of the story: the developer base of FreeBSD is not large enough to
maintain a large number of releases. In my humble opinion, having 8.0
7.0 and 6.* is even too much. The developers are working on 8.0, they
still have a very good grasp of 7.0 but 6.* becomes old stuff, more or
less forgotten. It then occurs that things are merged to the 6.* branch
which are perhaps susceptible of destabilising it. Personnally i have
seen the same occurring with 6.0, 5.0 and 4.*, for me the last releases
of the 4.* were very poor on my laptop while the early 4.* releases were
perfectly OK.  

I think it is very unreasonable for end users to ask maintaining, e.g.
6.2 ad vitam eternam. The real stable branch is now 7.* and diverting
effort to polish the 6.* is a waste of time. People wanting a very
stable system should simply use something else, like Debian stable,
official RedHat, etc. whose aim is precisely to offer the maximum
stability, with only security and bug fixes, and for extended periods of
time. The price you pay is obsoleted and "unsexy" systems, which is
probably OK for the intended use. On the other hand i have no business
running such a system.



-- 

Michel TALON

--On June 8, 2008 5:49:20 PM +0200 Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> 
wrote:
>
> I think it is very unreasonable for end users to ask maintaining, e.g.
> 6.2 ad vitam eternam. The real stable branch is now 7.* and diverting
> effort to polish the 6.* is a waste of time. People wanting a very
> stable system should simply use something else, like Debian stable,
> official RedHat, etc. whose aim is precisely to offer the maximum
> stability, with only security and bug fixes, and for extended periods of
> time. The price you pay is obsoleted and "unsexy" systems, which
is
> probably OK for the intended use. On the other hand i have no business
> running such a system.
Please do understand that for some of us, these are not choices.  I wiped 
a FreeBSD machine and bought and installed RedHat because a vendor's 
software would only run on RedHat.  The experience was a painful one. 
RedHat's updates are a pure PITA.  The box now runs FreeBSD again, and I 
doubt I will ever experiment with something else again.

If I can't have FreeBSD, I won't run a server.  I don't think
I'm alone.

Paul Schmehl
If it isn't already obvious,
my opinions are my own and not
those of my employer.

On 2008-Jun-08 17:49:20 +0200, Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
wrote:
>and it is now working perfectly well without any trouble. The only
>"gotcha" is the slowness of X problem when compiling, but i live
with that.
Have you tried SCHED_ULE?  In my experience, it does a better job of
scdeduling than SCHED_4BSD, even on UP machines (YMMV).
>which are perhaps susceptible of destabilising it. Personnally i have
>seen the same occurring with 6.0, 5.0 and 4.*, for me the last releases
>of the 4.* were very poor on my laptop while the early 4.* releases were
>perfectly OK.  
The difficulty with the later 4.x releases was that there were major
differences between the 4.x and later kernels and this made it
increasingly difficult to backport bugfixes.  This is less of an issue
with now 4.x is out of the way.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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