An
IT systems administrator working for a company or other institution (e. g. in education or for a NGO) wants to
schedule upgrades (e. g. time for
possibly dealing with technical issues) and
announce downtime to the users.
For me at home a delay does not bother me at all, but
a business may be
less flexible about this. One
may argue you get an excellent open-source OS
for free, so stop complaining, but it
marginally undermines
perceived credibility if deadlines are not met.
I *am* such an systems administrator for a company. And *the hell* I would schedule upgrades of critical systems either based on some *expected* (it actually says so on the release schedule page!) RELEASE-date and in general never directly after a new major release.
The first systems a new major RELEASE will go on, are e.g. my private desktop or the laptop that isn't terribly critical for me getting work done.
If the 14.x branch has prooven to have worked out the usual small glitches and regressions a new major release often brings with it (this time especially true regarding OpenSSL3), I *may* upgrade my home server and see how it holds up there.
Only then I'd consider moving any production system to a new branch - and only if it brings some real advantages in production. Otherwise: never touch a running system. I have plenty of fires to put out on non-BSD systems every day. The FreeBSD systems are happily chugging along on 13.2-RELEASE and will continue to do so, so why open a new can of worms (unnecessarily)?
The next major upgrades I have to schedule are the remaining 2 hosts running 12.4-RELEASE which will be upgraded to 13.2-RELEASE - and both will be replaced by new systems anyways, so no need to rush there either.
I thoroughly support the statements about releasing *when it's finished*. We all can constantly see what's happening with commercial software (e.g. "triple-A" games) that gets released when the managers and bean-counters dictate it should be, completely ignoring the warnings of everybody who actually *works* on that software.
I consider the FreeBSD developers and release engineers to be sane and competent professionals, which don't have to bow before any PHB. So they will do the only correct thing and release when it is done, not on some artifical deadline.
github.com
