End Of OpenBSD 3.0-STABLE Branch - Upgrade To 3.2 72
jukal writes "From here: "Hello folks,
Due to the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.2, the 3.0-STABLE
branch will be out of regular maintainance starting
december 1st. There will be NO MORE fixes commited to
this branch after this day.
People relying on 3.0-STABLE (or older releases even) are
strongly advised to upgrade to a more recent release
(preferrably 3.2 as it becomes available) as soon as
possible. Thanks for reading,
Miod" Download from your preferred FTP mirror."
buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
What World Do These People Live In? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they assume I have only one box, or that I don't bother to test things, or that I don't lose any money if the upgrade is perfectly smooth? Do they assume that I won't switch to something with a better support policy (and more notice for dropping support) than what they do?
Do any of these people know anyone who manages systems for a living, or do they only talk to other developers?
Re:What World Do These People Live In? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you assume that they have the resources to support older releases just because it is an inconvenience for your to upgrade? They are offering you a really great OS for free. They work really hard to make sure that it is the best it can be. And what I like most about the OpenBSD team is that they really take a stand for freedom issues in software (read Theo's stance on the Sun ECC code being included in OpenSSL in this message [theaimsgroup.com], or check out the entire thread [theaimsgroup.com]).
Give these guys a break. You had 6 months to test 3.1 and upgrade your boxes from 3.0. If you don't like their policy, use something else. As someone said over a deadly.org, if you want support for older releases, pay someone to provide patches for your system. Whatever you decide to do, stop complaining about something they give away for free.
Release Cycles are Open Source's major flaw (Score:4, Insightful)
What open source needs is a company which provides an 18 month upgrade cycle and supports three concurrent versions. This is exactly what Sun provides with Solaris, and is something that system admins really badly need. And its not just the upgrading issue. You also lose time on the front end of this release cycle because it takes a long time for vendors to certify their software for the new release of the operating system. RedHat is starting to ge some kind of clue about this and is switching to an 18 month release cycle with their advanced server product. They still put on this godawfully stupid dog and pony show though about they'll come in and (for a price) help to upgrade all you machines every time they release a new version. This is entirely unacceptable and waste of resource and a waste of money spent on RedHat. It is basically RedHat trying to turn their laziness into a business model.
And please don't talk about how you've got a couple of scripts whipped together to make it easy to manage 10 openbsd boxes. I'm on a team that manages *850* open source boxes. Whatever you suggest doing simply doesn't scale well enough to deal with doing 850 upgrades every 6-12 months. An upgrade will take everyone on my team offline for at least a month, and we can't afford to be doing that all the time. Also, the next upgrade we're doing is from RH6.2 to RH7.2. We haven't had the time yet to certify all our software for RH7.3 or RH8.0 so we're actually going to be starting out behind once again... This is how system management works at very large sites though.
Re:What World Do These People Live In? (Score:3, Insightful)