Except for my port testing VMs, I only run -RELEASE since the release of 11.0. In all that time the somewhat recent "ZFS mess" was the first time I really needed to include patches in my build. Don't get me wrong, there were bugs, but they're typically of the "mild annoyance" kind, with workarounds possible. So, needing a patch for a -RELEASE version actually was kind of shocking, because it is so rare.
Lucky You. Let's have a look:
- I *need* patches to use Kerberos-Servers with more than one realm (on the same node), because that was forgotten to implement. (usually one uses one realm for the intranet and another for the perimeter)
- I *need* patches to have my firewall work at all with interface specific rules and IPv6 linklocal addresses on the interfaces, as the interface info for local connections is mangled between lo0 and the actual interface (not sure about the current state),
- I *need* patches to have inflight reloadable firewall configs that do not drop dynamic sessions (sometimes backup up a database to the cloud takes two days, and I don't want to wait that long for a change of some firewall setting)
- I *need* patches to have my tunnels work with MTU 1500 over IPv6 through the firewalls, because a firewall needs to reassemble fragmented packets in order to inspect them and ipfw doesn't do that for v6 - otherwise I would need to use some entirely different firewall software (which may or may not support the situation).
So far just a selection of some issues where I had to spend work to get things running
I'm pretty sure most other people's experience is similar. Therefore I consider this take unnecessarily provocative.
Oh! Now it gets grotesque. Is this the googlespeak directive, where we are not allowed to say anything that somebody might interpret as negative, and that might hurt the delicate feelings of - whoever? Where we are no longer allowed to
analyze facts, in other words, to do engineering - because we don't need to anymore, as Google (etc.) already know best what is good for us, and we only have to be happy and consume, in that
brave new world?
If you really expect "bug-free" software, you'd have to look somewhere else (pure lab projects, formally proved, not able to do any real-life work ...)
I don't expect bug-free software. To the contrary, I expect to have to occasionally fix or workaround bugs! And I expect a supportive community where we share our experiences of hacking and workarounding and making things work - just like it was earlier, before googlespeak.
I do
not expect a community of gadget-thriven consumer bots who need the guts of the technology always stay veiled before them, because they get disturbed by the bloody view of actual engineering (and instead need 16 mio rgb colors on the cpu cooler [*]).
Sorry, but this needs to be said in clear words. This is a bigger issue - I am so much pissed by everywhere getting only stupid "solution" babble, instead of engineering facts, and always being treated as a stupid consumer who should just be happy and buy all the crap and leave the thinking to others.
The trait of FreeBSD was always that if something doesn't work as expected, you can be sure that the source for /usr/bin/foobar is to be found in /usr/src/usr.bin/foobar, and you can just change it and then "make; make install" will cleanly activate the change.
This is the actual unique feature of the Berkeley, which no other OS has (anymore)!
[*] meanwhile watching the next "MAX" airplane fall from the sky - which is very much the same topic (forgotten that one at first).