14.1-RELEASE EOL, Quarterly Packages

astyle said:
Your hardware, you decide whether to install the latest updates or not. There's no obligation and no real pressure to upgrade every time there's a new release. Some users prefer to have smoother upgrades, so they are willing to put in the time and effort to do it often. Yeah, there are benefits to doing it like that - those benefits don't necessarily make sense for other users.

I don't upgrade until my installation of Firefox says, "I can't handle the Internet any more, upgrade me or else!". This is the moment that prompts me to clean out my machine and install up-to-date software from scratch. Reasoning behind such a policy - I don't want to sink time into upgrading every time there's a new release. And no, I don't want a constant flow of updates, either.
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Announcing an “EOL” is to some extent pressure. Sir Dice won’t help you (and will scold you) if you even mention something that’s “EOL’. It’s absurd. I still have a server running 9.1with Apache 2.2. Up 770 days. Runs just as well as the day I put it up..FreeBSD 10 sucked. FreeBSD 11 stunk. No need to upgrade to something that isn’t better than what you’re using.

And the entire point of major releases is that you don’t need to upgrade things if you don’t need to. I’ll just install a 14.3 kernel on my 14.1 system. To me, there’s no difference between 14.1-STABLE and 14.4. It’s just 14 with a bunch of updates and patches. A “release” is just a STABLE snapshot within a major.
 
For good reasons, "working" (in terms of "appears" to be working as expected) isn't always the case and you have the whole security approach where your current software might execute code you likely don't want it to. You also very likely won't be able to get support if anything goes wrong running "unsupported" software as most value time and wont setup up an ancient environment to troubleshoot unless you're lucky and its also reproducable on current versions but don't expect backports.
 
I never understood this "supported" software in the OSS community. There is no support for any open source projects as far as I know. Just the communities helping each other out. So all OSS is unsupported and I'm tired of that as an argument.

Now what I think is meant by "support" is : accepting bug reports. That's not support. Not at all, never has been, never will be. That's fixing bugs, not assisting in using software. Well that's just my silly 2 cents on the matter.
 
Specifically for FreeBSD, "supported" means security related patches for -RELEASE branches. FreeBSD -CURRENT is by definition "supported" because that is the active development HEAD.
Bug reports can be written against anything, accepting is more "we acknowledge that is a bug on that branch, but it may be fixed on another"

"...assisting in using software..." FreeBSD as a project is comprised of volunteers; noone assists in using the software.
What FreeBSD has always had is what other projects call "Community Support". You ask questions on a mailing list, you post a new thread here and someone with the time and knowledge may or may not responsd.

If you are paying $2000USD per year for "support" like QuickBooks that is a different arrangement. FreeBSD has never charged anyone a fee for "support"
 
Yeah, with Windows, 'support' really means 'security updates', but it can also mean 'some assurances of program compatibility'. If you try to install Office 365 on Win7, then you're basically on your own, there won't be any hotfix patches to fix things if the installation messes up something on your machine. Even if Office365 actually runs OK.

With Open Source, it's actually very similar - it's probably not impossible to install KDE 6 on FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. But it's a lot of work to fight past compiler errors and to patch the code so that components this far apart in age can cooperate on the same machine. Another case where hotfix patches are... not gonna come. It may be not impossible to compile KDE 6 on say, 13.2-RELEASE, then the KDE project can claim to support FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE and later versions...
 
astyle said:
Yeah, with Windows, 'support' really means 'security updates', but it can also mean 'some assurances of program compatibility'. If you try to install Office 365 on Win7, then you're basically on your own, there won't be any hotfix patches to fix things if the installation messes up something on your machine. Even if Office365 actually runs OK.

With Open Source, it's actually very similar - it's probably not impossible to install KDE 6 on FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. But it's a lot of work to fight past compiler errors and to patch the code so that components this far apart in age can cooperate on the same machine. Another case where hotfix patches are... not gonna come. It may be not impossible to compile KDE 6 on say, 13.2-RELEASE, then the KDE project can claim to support FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE and later versions...
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that's not really what I’m talking about. Nothing is really supported in FreeBSD except what they feel like doing. You find a bug and fat chance someone is going to fix it for you. You fix it yourself. That’s why we like open source. The if_re driver hasn’t worked properly for 20 years. Nobody is going to fix it for you.

What irritates me is the scolding you get when you ask for help on something a year old. Just because they’ve stopped providing security updates shouldn’t mean that you can’t get help with it or that you’re doing something wrong by using it.
 
Barney said:
The if_re driver hasn’t worked properly for 20 years. Nobody is going to fix it for you.
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Not true. net/realtek-re-kmod/ works fine, I use it with 14.2-RELEASE. 😏 This last saw an update in November of 2024. You just have to know where to look, or ask around.

Barney said:
What irritates me is the scolding you get when you ask for help on something a year old. Just because they’ve stopped providing security updates shouldn’t mean that you can’t get help with it or that you’re doing something wrong by using it.
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I already explained in post #31 why EoL stuff is not supported. You usually get a scolding if your comments present an atitude of entitlement, rather than a willingness to learn about reality on the ground. Officially, devs are gonna prioritize up-to-date stuff. Unofficially, it's gonna be rank-and-file users helping each other, like on these Forums.

TBF, there's no real problem getting help with old stuff. People help each other with old stuff all the time, that does happen on these Forums. But if you expect something to work as documented in the User Handbook, expect to be told to run the same version (or newer) as what the User Handbook mentions. There are older versions of User Handbook available on the Internet, BTW.
 
Barney said:
Nothing is really supported in FreeBSD except what they feel like doing.
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It's the nature of volunteer-based OSS including FreeBSD. ;)

Barney said:
You find a bug and fat chance someone is going to fix it for you. You fix it yourself. That’s why we like open source.
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Exactly.

Barney said:
The if_re driver hasn’t worked properly for 20 years. Nobody is going to fix it for you.
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It depends, unfortunately.
If any of mandatory-for-fixing information is NOT disclosed under BSD-compatible licenses (in case for FreeBSD, would be GPLv2 for Linux), no one can fix it for FreeBSD base system.😭
 
T-Aoki said:
If any of mandatory-for-fixing information is NOT disclosed under BSD-compatible licenses (in case for FreeBSD, would be GPLv2 for Linux), no one can fix it for FreeBSD base system.
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All you have to do is read the sources - if you know how to do it and know how to solve the problem. That was the whole point of starting the Open Source movement, BTW.

In Open Source, there's just no such animal as mandatory-for-fixing information. Instead, there's entirety of source code and patches. That only has value if you have the brains to solve the problem to begin with. Technically, any problem can be solved if you have access to the source code. Having the brains to know how to solve a given problem - now that is a separate matter. :rolleyes: If I had the brains, I'd have solved several of FreeBSD's sore points (like wifi roaming or KDE Wayland) by now. I'm only painfully aware of what it means to lack the brains to solve a problem even when all the sources are available.
 
astyle said:
In Open Source, there's just no such animal as mandatory-for-fixing information.
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For pure software, yes. But for hardware drivers, not always.
Not read if_re related codes, but for example, x11/nvidia-driver comes from pre-compiled objects.
And even if all source codes of the drivers are provided, if we want to make hardwares newer than the disclosed drivers working, existing driver doesn't work, and reverse-engineering of the hardware is prohibited, how can we fix the driver to work with the new generations of hardwares? This is MY point.
 
T-Aoki said:
reverse-engineering of the hardware is prohibited
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Reverse-engineering is not prohibited... If you have the skill, nothing can stop you from doing that.

Yeah, if you want the newest-gen hardware, then yeah, you might be stuck on something technical, just because you don't have the skill to reverse-engineer it and write a hardware driver yourself so that it works on FreeBSD. And in that case, it might make sense to shop around for previous-gen stuff that has working drivers.

The realtek driver actually has some pre-compiled blobs, too. But it's in ports, and so is the nvidia driver. Just re-compile them as you would a regular port. I can't vouch for the NVidia driver, though, because I'm on all-AMD hardware.
 
astyle said:
Reverse-engineering is not prohibited... If you have the skill, nothing can stop you from doing that.

Yeah, if you want the newest-gen hardware, then yeah, you might be stuck on something technical, just because you don't have the skill to reverse-engineer it and write a hardware driver yourself so that it works on FreeBSD. And in that case, it might make sense to shop around for previous-gen stuff that has working drivers.

The realtek driver actually has some pre-compiled blobs, too. But it's in ports, and so is the nvidia driver. Just re-compile them as you would a regular port. I can't vouch for the NVidia driver, though, because I'm on all-AMD hardware.
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I’m not sure which driver you’re talking about but the re ethernet driver is copyright 2003 and is 1 source file.I fixed it for my own use in FreeBSD 7 but have since simply avoided MBs with realtek chips because they’re junk.
 
Barney said:
I’m not sure which driver you’re talking about but the re ethernet driver is copyright 2003 and is 1 source file.I fixed it for my own use in FreeBSD 7 but have since simply avoided MBs with realtek chips because they’re junk.
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I'm talking about the realtek ethernet driver contained in this port: net/realtek-re-kmod. The mobo that has the realtek ethernet is an Asus Prime B650-M CSM. Works fantastic with FreeBSD. Double-checking the specs is left as an exercise for the reader.
 
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