“RNG broken for last 4 months”

Re:“RNG broken for last 4 months” by barkingcat on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @08:42PM (#9066519)

It is also terribly stupid for software and application developers to run -CURRENT (as a base/primary platform) because it's for the development of the OS itself.

The closest linux analogy is Linus's unstable git branch or maybe the redhat rawhide https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide - even that has warnings:

from the Rawhide wiki: "Not recommended for production systems

We do not recommend that you run Rawhide as your primary production operating system. Instead, we suggest you could install and run Rawhide:

    As a live environment only
    In a virtual machine (VM) instance
    On a secondary system
    On a multiboot system, alongside a stable release of Fedora or another operating system

This allows you to test Rawhide without any impact to your day-to-day workflow. "

-CURRENT is the freebsd version of that: you know that it's going to be where things are being torn out and put back in on a hour to hour basis.

The group of people using -CURRENT is akin to the group of kernel maintainers in linux-land.

I do admit though - the rawhide warning is more verbose and clearer than the FREEBSD-CURRENT warnings. That's one part that I can see the community improving. I might even write some verbiage myself for contribution.

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Re:“RNG broken for last 4 months” by coldtea on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @09:14PM (#9066629)

>It is also terribly stupid for software and application developers to run -CURRENT because it's for the development of the OS itself.

Yeah, and that's why you should use it, to be sure your app works ok with the upcoming changes to the core OS.

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Re:“RNG broken for last 4 months” by barkingcat on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @09:30PM (#9066683)

Not necessarily. If you want to know if your app works with upcoming FreeBSD release versions, you actually care - and you would know to check

https://www.freebsd.org/releng/#freeze

and

https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/relnotes/article.ht...

and

https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11

and be subscribed to the -CURRENT mailing list - which the development documentation indicate as mandatory when using a -CURRENT build.

Then you would know whether the compiler suite is being torn out (remember? FreeBSD switched from GCC to LLVM/Clang - yes - that was done in the last -CURRENT development cycle)

So your software might not even build because of certain base OS issues. BUT you would know all that already - and you would run -CURRENT in a VM that you blow away and rebuild as needed.

Or in continuous integration like jenkins. https://wiki.freebsd.org/201405DevSummit/Jenkins

BUT NO - you would use it in testing only. You wouldn't use it as a main platform.

Unless you don't really care - then it's on you.

Many devs run 10.1 and then run -CURRENT in VM's or on a spare laptop or machine for this purpose.

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