TL;DR - Release Engineering is apparently only committed to supporting FreeBSD 12 for 18 months
Before FreeBSD 12.0 was released, the "Security Information" page (Internet Archive capture on November 22, 2018) said:
That page was edited multiple times and currently (12-Dec-2018) reads:
In other words, the support commitment went from the expected 5 years to "maybe" 18 months (per TBD in the above table). This is completely un-workable for me - if I wait for a 12.1 release (which likely wouldn't happen for at least 4 months from the release of 12.0), by the time I've built new images for all of my servers, the EoL of 12 will be in a year. I suspect there are others who will be similarly impacted.
Even more disappointing is that FreeBSD 12.0 was released with what was essentially a "We don't know how long we'll support 12, but we'll let you know some time in the future" footnote on the "Supported Releases" page. Note that the 5-year support model was still in place as of November 22nd (the date of the Internet Archive capture above). Google's cache (local PDF capture here) still shows December 2023 (anticipated) although it adds wording about "re-evaluating the 5-year support guarantee".
Over a week ago I sent the following message to re@ and core-secretary@ (core-secretary because they posted the announcement, re because, well, re). Having received no response and seeing the "Supported Releases" page further walk back the EoL commitment, I reluctantly decided to post here to see what others thought about this change.
From: IN%"Terry Kennedy" 3-DEC-2018 00:07:33.57
To: IN%"core-secretary@freebsd.org", IN%"re@freebsd.org"
Subj: Re: [FreeBSD-Announce] Interim support guarantee for FreeBSD 12
TL;DR - Please *DON'T* do this for FreeBSD 12.
Rather than wait for the "opportunity for community feedback"*, I figured
I'd jump in now.
What my company needs is _longer_ guarantees, not shorter ones. Micro-
soft does 10 years (at least until Windows 10, billed as "the last Windows
you'll ever need", but not for the reason they think). Debian LTS is 5
years. Ubuntu just announced an extension of their LTS from 5 years to 10
years.
We were making plans to move our 10.x systems to 12, but the delays in
getting 12 out mean that we're getting "You're using an unsupported re-
lease" warnings. Not to mention certain ports maintainers who seem to de-
light in ripping out support for old versions days after the old versions
are actually out of support (for example, ports/head/net/samba48/Makefile
r483807)
Now we have to re-evaluate our FreeBSD strategy - if FreeBSD 12 is go-
ing to go EoL at some indetermate time before the currently-listed 12/2023
date, we may need to look into alternate operating systems.
Note that we build from source, customize a large number of things, and
generally (at least we used to) jump 2 major releases at a time, so things
like freebsd-update (even if it didn't have the problems noted by a large
number of users) isn't a solution for us. Even if it was, we still could
not handle the downtime and multiple reboots needed - we'd still need to
pre-stage the update on identical systems and swap disks to meed our ser-
vice commitments.
I urge you to reconsider this poorly-thought-through decision, at least
for the 12.X releases. It is grossly unfair to issue 12.0-RELEASE and then
make users wait at least 4 months to find out how long (or short!) the re-
lease lifetime will be (Dec 11, 2018 release, "discussions ... will be com-
plete by Mar 31, 2019" and I assume the announcement of the decision will
not be immediate). Plus, it seems that you're flailing about, with FreeBSD
11 being under the "old" new model (posted Feb 3, 2015) and 12 being retro-
actively under the "new" new model (posted sometime after Mar 31, 2019).
I expect a number of users will be blindsided by this - I haven't seen
the announcement that a change to shorten the support lifetime on the of-
ficial FreeBSD forums, nor in a quick search on the freebsd-stable and
freebsd-current mailing lists for November and December. All there is is
the last 3 lines on the "FreeBSD Security Information" page, and I bet
most people haven't found that change yet.
Sincerely,
Terry Kennedy [company affiliation info removed]
New York, NY USA
* I'm [in]famously known in some circles for saying at an open-mic session
at a DECUS Symposium, after the previous speaker was told "thank you for
your feedback" (translation - "get lost"): "In acoustics, feedback is a loud
squealing noise, and I think that's what you're getting here."
Before FreeBSD 12.0 was released, the "Security Information" page (Internet Archive capture on November 22, 2018) said:
Code:
Branch Release Type Release Date Expected EoL
stable/12 n/a n/a n/a December 31, 2023 (anticipated)
releng/12.0 12.0-RELEASE n/a n/a 12.1-RELEASE + 3 months
stable/11 n/a n/a n/a September 30, 2021
releng/11.2 11.2-RELEASE n/a June 28, 2018 11.3-RELEASE + 3 months
Code:
Branch Release Type Release Date Expected EoL
stable/12 n/a n/a n/a June 30, 2020 (TBD)
releng/12.0 12.0-RELEASE n/a December 11, 2018 12.1-RELEASE + 3 months
stable/11 n/a n/a n/a September 30, 2021
releng/11.2 11.2-RELEASE n/a June 28, 2018 11.3-RELEASE + 3 months
Even more disappointing is that FreeBSD 12.0 was released with what was essentially a "We don't know how long we'll support 12, but we'll let you know some time in the future" footnote on the "Supported Releases" page. Note that the 5-year support model was still in place as of November 22nd (the date of the Internet Archive capture above). Google's cache (local PDF capture here) still shows December 2023 (anticipated) although it adds wording about "re-evaluating the 5-year support guarantee".
Over a week ago I sent the following message to re@ and core-secretary@ (core-secretary because they posted the announcement, re because, well, re). Having received no response and seeing the "Supported Releases" page further walk back the EoL commitment, I reluctantly decided to post here to see what others thought about this change.
From: IN%"Terry Kennedy" 3-DEC-2018 00:07:33.57
To: IN%"core-secretary@freebsd.org", IN%"re@freebsd.org"
Subj: Re: [FreeBSD-Announce] Interim support guarantee for FreeBSD 12
TL;DR - Please *DON'T* do this for FreeBSD 12.
Rather than wait for the "opportunity for community feedback"*, I figured
I'd jump in now.
What my company needs is _longer_ guarantees, not shorter ones. Micro-
soft does 10 years (at least until Windows 10, billed as "the last Windows
you'll ever need", but not for the reason they think). Debian LTS is 5
years. Ubuntu just announced an extension of their LTS from 5 years to 10
years.
We were making plans to move our 10.x systems to 12, but the delays in
getting 12 out mean that we're getting "You're using an unsupported re-
lease" warnings. Not to mention certain ports maintainers who seem to de-
light in ripping out support for old versions days after the old versions
are actually out of support (for example, ports/head/net/samba48/Makefile
r483807)
Now we have to re-evaluate our FreeBSD strategy - if FreeBSD 12 is go-
ing to go EoL at some indetermate time before the currently-listed 12/2023
date, we may need to look into alternate operating systems.
Note that we build from source, customize a large number of things, and
generally (at least we used to) jump 2 major releases at a time, so things
like freebsd-update (even if it didn't have the problems noted by a large
number of users) isn't a solution for us. Even if it was, we still could
not handle the downtime and multiple reboots needed - we'd still need to
pre-stage the update on identical systems and swap disks to meed our ser-
vice commitments.
I urge you to reconsider this poorly-thought-through decision, at least
for the 12.X releases. It is grossly unfair to issue 12.0-RELEASE and then
make users wait at least 4 months to find out how long (or short!) the re-
lease lifetime will be (Dec 11, 2018 release, "discussions ... will be com-
plete by Mar 31, 2019" and I assume the announcement of the decision will
not be immediate). Plus, it seems that you're flailing about, with FreeBSD
11 being under the "old" new model (posted Feb 3, 2015) and 12 being retro-
actively under the "new" new model (posted sometime after Mar 31, 2019).
I expect a number of users will be blindsided by this - I haven't seen
the announcement that a change to shorten the support lifetime on the of-
ficial FreeBSD forums, nor in a quick search on the freebsd-stable and
freebsd-current mailing lists for November and December. All there is is
the last 3 lines on the "FreeBSD Security Information" page, and I bet
most people haven't found that change yet.
Sincerely,
Terry Kennedy [company affiliation info removed]
New York, NY USA
* I'm [in]famously known in some circles for saying at an open-mic session
at a DECUS Symposium, after the previous speaker was told "thank you for
your feedback" (translation - "get lost"): "In acoustics, feedback is a loud
squealing noise, and I think that's what you're getting here."