OH said:FreeBSD 8.3 was barely released as preparations for 9.1 got underway (as a result of the shortened release cycle that has us supporting two production releases?) and at the same time we're introducing pkgng, optionsng, new Makefile headers, replacing CVS with SVN, not to mention the ongoing work on clang (and to a lesser extent ZFS).
Correct but that is always the case. There are always 2 production branches that need to be supported. At least that is the case since FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE.
Pkgng. A very nice and promising tool. Originally it was expected to be part of FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE. This has changed and there are some thoughts for either 9.2 or 10.0. Why?
The switch from CVS to SVN. The idea is not bad. However, timing is everything. There was absolutely no reason to force this without any planning. Look at the result. Nobody knows what will happen for the 8 & 9 branches yet. Even worse, people who used to update their sources using csup() were not able to do that anymore for 9.1-beta and 9.1-RC1 but they can use it for 9.1-RC2!!!
Clang. It didn't work for 9.0-RELEASE and now it is planned for 10.0-RELEASE Again, why? And I really don't want to hear anymore about the licensing issues. At least not until 2014 when 10 will be released!
Things are really developing fast. Look at the competition:
Virtualization... Yes, there is a on going project for a native hypervisor expected for FreeBSD 10. blah, blah
High Availability... HAST is here but I don't see any rapid evolvement. Where is the asynchronous replication?
IPv6... Why on earth do I still have to compile IPSEC in the kernel?
The list can go on...
OH said:For a project, as wblock@ correctly states, handled mainly by volunteers, that seems like quite the extra workload for what I assume to be a virtually equal amount of developers / committers.
You are right. That is why I would never blame developers or commiters. It is somebody else's job to support them and support the project as well.
OH said:Just before submitting I see gkontos' reply. I just have to add that I'm not bitter (but then again I haven't tried setting up LT2P VPN with radius either, net/mpd5 FTW).
This is just what I'm seeing, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, so I'll stop right here and get myself some proper whisky.
I think that I am more frustrated than bitter. And that is because I love FreeBSD and I would really hate to see all this effort going wasted.
Btw. My comments are not personal, just the result of pure frustration!