So basically the same as Debian and Ubuntu LTS? Debian releases every ~2 years with 5 years of Security+LTS support, which is the same as Ubuntu (LTS):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases
From "Changes to the FreeBSD Support Model":
- Resolving our arbitrary (and unofficial) 5-year branch lifetime
guarantee. The support policy is that the stable/X branch will be
supported for 5 years (minimum) from the point X.0-RELEASE is released.
We now guarantee a 5-year lifetime on the branch, regardless of how many
releases are built from the branch. Additionally, a "last minute"
release from the stable/X branch does not constitute expanding the support
lifetime for the branch as a whole for an additional two years.
- A new stable/ branch release will not occur before two years after the
X.0-RELEASE from the prior branch. This limits the number of
simultaneous supported branches, which will greatly reduce the overall
number of branches that must be maintained and build-tested for
Security Advisories and Errata Notices, reducing turnaround time.
1. GP makes me wonder whether the FreeBSD definition of LTS is less than people expect.
2. Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. i.e. Make the actual OS files changing have no effect upon hosted system/application stability.
This is how things worked at Yahoo and WhatsApp.
For the most part, a server kept whatever version of FreeBSD it was installed with, and the application logic lived in /usr/local/ or /home/y/ or /home/whatsapp/
Keep your 'build' machine to compile production executables on the oldest OS release of your fleet, and everything should run everywhere. (You'll need to use the compat-X stuff so your FreeBSD X+1 machines can run FreeBSD X binaries, but that's easy)
You can use stuff from the base system, but not if you expect recent changes.
I don't remember ever doing an OS upgrade at Yahoo, although it must have happened. In my group, we only got updates with new hardware; which was fine, hardware was changing rapidly.
At WhatsApp, I drove the OS updates towards the end of WhatsApp's use of FreeBSD. A fair amount was just not wanting to have 4 different major versions out there, but there were also forced updates to get important network bugfixes or performance improvements. Sometimes it was easier to find the handful of boxes that were too old to use something nice in a script and update them, rather than fixing the script to not use the nice feature.
When we ran into bugs on older versions, upgrading to a version that already had it fixed was sometimes an option, but sometimes it'd need to be backported, and sometimes the bug was still in -current. We didn't run into too many of those though, our local patch set was never more than about 10 patches.
Personally, the times I upgraded a FreeBSD box the process felt very smooth. To the point that I’m trying to understand @rsyncs point and seem to be missing something critical.
But, darkhelmet and I were discussing updating FreeBSD at Yahoo; doing the update from the Handbook wouldn't be the right way to do it, because you would miss out on Yahoo specific patches, which were likely required for some key Yahoo software. I don't think it was common knowledge how to do it, so some documentation might have been nice, but mostly teams at Yahoo just didn't do it at that time for better or worse.
FreBSD also supports in-place upgrades for major version numbers:
* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/
* https://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/freebsd-13-released-ho...
There could be policy reasons why someone may decent not to do it: if you have a large fleet of cattle machines it may be easier to just redeploy from scratch. Home(lab) users and pet machines at companies may do otherwise.
What did they move to? And do you know why they switched?
- if you could start all over fresh, what OS (and why) would you run your business on?
- what’s your opinion about Dragonfly? Any experience with it?
- what are the things you love about FreeBSD, as well as what still needs improvement (besides release cycle topic)?
Since ZFS is now so core to what we do, it was a very natural evolution.
I have zero experience with Dragonfly BSD.
I love that FreeBSD is still a very simple UNIX without complications like systemd. I was recently tinkering with a raspberry pi and had to work out wifi connectivity and had to interface with ... what is that weird wifi subsystem that linux uses ? Supplicant ? Wow.
I just want to pipeline commands and edit config files. I don't care that it's inefficient or doesn't scale. It has scaled just fine for me.
OpenBSD has better integrations with ifconfig and wpa though, it’s possible they are ported over now, but wifi config is the same as in Linux (or had been for quite a significant amount of time) on freebsd.
Completely agree about the opaque and incidental complexity of the systemd ecosystem though, I’m glad people love it but it’s not for me.
Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month?
This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software?
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
I don't know how many FreeBSD devs are paid full time and how much of it is voluntary, but this is the outcome that I would expect absent a traditional customer-vendor relationship. This is basically every open source project ever where most of the work being done is non-commercial.
Did anything come of it?
I'm curious: Why _shouldn't_ it be an OS primarily for its developers? Why should they focus on others when they're the one building it?
- They use a lot of code that they don't develop. If FreeBSD is not for others then those external projects and developers would be disinclined to make their stuff work on FreeBSD.
- Every new FreeBSD developer comes from a non-FreeBSD developer who is interested in FreeBSD and probably uses it. More developers ~= better FreeBSD for FreeBSD developers.
- More users (very roughly) means more money. Whether that's money to pay for more FreeBSD developers, or incentive to make your hardware work with FreeBSD or port your software to it, there are some positive effects on the system and possibly your wallet.
- Personal satisfaction to develop software lots of people use. Also the recognition that comes with that can get you a job or help you meet people and go places.
So lots of reasons. Even being purely selfish and hoping to extract the most from it, there are plausible reasons why some amount of focus on others might be the best way to go about developing a the project.
How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder?
Probably more then ever ;)
5.x had all kinds of problems and then 6.x was the first release that barely got out into public use before 7.x undercut it ... and that is the cycle we have been in ever since.
4.x had minor releases going all the way to 4.11. Nowadays, major versions generally stop at X.3 (for instance, 11.3).
There wasn't a "STABLE" release of it until FreeBSD 5.3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBS...
FreeBSD may not be a perfectly-run project but I honestly can't imagine using anything else :)
Discourse used to be a thing.
That person was Linus.
I've found my share of trolls and assholes, but likewise I've found that being forthright, polite and respectful tends to yield answers.
Imagine a term like "RTFM" being coined and used in popular tech formus today. Back in the days "RTFM" was a valid one-word response to any number of questions by a n00b; if said question was in an IRC channel you'd often get kicked or even kick-banned for good measure.
or "flamewar", which almost sounds a bit anachronistic now. I don't think I've been in one in a long time actually. The early 2000s were a lot rougher and often toxic compared to what you have today.
Internet discourse is still hit and miss but it's more mature.
Strongly agree. It used to be the accepted norm that you’d ban relentlessly evade to get back at the admin who flamed you in their ban message. However, there was the tacit understanding that it was the internet and none of it was real: just log off and go outside once you got sick of it.
Now that i've spent time answering support questions on a forum for an open source project i'm involved with...
I still think rtfm is rude and wouldn't say it, but i 100% understand why people would want to say it.
On one hand, I see so many occasions where someone typically new to something even if they aren’t new to programming asking questions that could be trivial found in a second.
On the other hand I’ve seen enough handwavy RTFM copypastas from people who clearly neglected to read the question being asked as well as enough manuals [documentation, etc.] that wants to make me bash my head in with how usuals, unspecific, difficult to navigate it is.
I’ve always believed that much of emergent online behavior can be explained by innate human social processes seeking a path to goal when the more likely paths aren’t present. Absent the normal cues of physical aggression or dominance/submission signaling, emergent processes bubble up and get adopted by the group based on utility. Our brains are constantly engaged in ways to determine our place in the hierarchy. For better or worse, most non-topical subtext in forums falls into “I’m better than you” or “we’re better than them”.
As far as the internet being nicer now than it used to be, I’m not so sure. As someone active on BBSs in the 1980 onward to the internet, there is a lot more passive aggression these days, most of it via leveraging of unspoken community norms. The notion of an “online community” couldn’t predate the concept of “online”, and the early BBS/networking felt more like operating a radio in isolation. The fact that you were interacting with someone far away was still a novelty. e.g., “someone from Singapore called my CatFUR line!”.
Edit: I feel like I should point out that I agree that RTFM is an incredibly offensive term, but some form of answer like: “it is covered in the documentation” actually conveys one important bit of information: The answer can actually be found in the documentation.
A direct link to the documentation section they should use is the minimal reasonable answer, in my opinion.
Ie, "I looked in the docs and couldn't find how to..."
When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
* vague
* no code example
* pretty basic that a google search could answer your question
* same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over
Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile).
If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different.
I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
I posted an answer to a question like 10 years ago before dynamic or anonymous types existed in .NET. It was valid and I later prefixed it to say another answer is now correct but mine was correct for the version of .NET in question.
Still has people downvoting today.
It really sucks answering questions and investing time when people downvote for silly stupid reasons.
I’ve also seen questions asked which were good questions with examples and such. But downvoted because “that’s now how you do it” despite “I can’t do it that way because of constraints in the system”
Part of SO is really good! It’s been a game changer. But it’s really a different community now than when it started. I miss the early days.
> Still has people downvoting today.
Aye that sucks. I have a PHP answer that is the accepted answer, but the PHP wonks got all up in arms about it because the immediate solution for the OP was to use the global keyword in their class method to get access to an array that's being created/modified in the global scope. I did caveat by letting them know this isn't a fantastic solution. But it looks like their app had a shedload of bigger problems that weren't going to be solved in my answer.
I also miss the early days.
Apropos my previous reply, I wasn't having a go at you, though re-reading it does seem that way, so I do apologise. I'd had a couple of wines and whenever stuff like this comes up I do feel slightly hacked off at all the effort I'd put into help build that empire (I was a <500 beta user, and was also a diamond mod). And all I got was a lousy mug and some crappy pens :)
That response doesn't disagree with the complaint.
Y solves their problem and is marked as the answer.
But X is exactly what _I_ am trying to do, and would solve my problem. But any other question regarding X is marked as a duplicate of this first question which only solves Y and not X.
I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
> Discourse used to be a thing.
That is adorable.
Fine by me, there's enough hatred in the world already, go express it to a shrink, instead :-)
Some do, I'm sure, and I guess someone who posts normal stuff under their name and insane stuff under a pseudonym probably counts as "self-censoring," in a sense.
I don't see how this can be true overall, though. Ten years ago, the time the grandparent poster mentioned, was about when I was realizing that even though the election was over, people I'd known all my life weren't going to stop posting (under their own names) racist Obama memes on Facebook or Twitter, implicitly daring the still-sane people to call them on it. Things haven't improved notably since then. It's not something I think about a lot but my sentiment about internet dialogue over the past decade is definitely not hey, look at all the self-censorship going on. People are clearly concerned with how their comments will be perceived in the future.
A worst-case 16 months sounds like an absurdly long support window by the standards of most actively developed projects; anything but the largest and most corporate of projects is unlikely to do better than that.
And it seems contradictory to complain that stable releases aren't supported long enough but you're waiting too long for new functionality. Of course everyone wants daily releases that are supported forever, but realistically with finite development effort most projects have to settle on something equivalent to "you can run -CURRENT or you can run LTS, pick your poison".
For core banking and other mission critical systems. Nobody upgrades an OS for fun, especially when the checklist for doing so is longer than both my arms put together.
This is not about security updates.
This is about using old, but still updated LTS/enterprise versions.
I don't know <<any>> enterprise mandating upgrade to the latest LTS within 6 months. Most do it 6 months before the old LTS period will expire :-))
If enterprises would consistently and massively upgrade early (for example within 1 year of a new release), vendors wouldn't need to offer this super long support on such a widespread scale. There's a reason Windows Server is supported for so many years, or RHEL, or SLES, or Solaris, or whatever.
The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold.
Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.
Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for production, release systems are 12.3 and 13.0 ...
... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with:
"That's fixed in current ..."
The 4.x nostalgia is justified: it was polished and polished and polished over many years and many organizations were incentivized to invest in that branch