Please create a -current forum

covacat said:
+1 for -CURRENT forum/section/whatever
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I still think the one valid counter-argument is that it would draw discussion (and yes, a lot of it will be about potential bugs) away from the place the devs follow anyways: the mailing list.

I'm personally not against a -CURRENT section. As also already mentioned, there are a few valid usecases.

I just imagine it might lead to a lot of the following over and over again:
  • Explaining people (newbies?) no, it doesn't mean "the latest and greatest"
  • Discussing "broken" upgrades with people who don't think about a rollback strategy
  • (IMHO worst) telling people to take their problem to the ML or bugzilla
 
eternal_noob said:
I predict that 95% of the posts will be this.
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That's my worry as well.

One might think a pinned post should help. Something like "If you suspect a bug, post on the mailing list. If you found a bug, create a PR. Don't post about it here", in big friendly letters. :cool:

In practice though, pinned posts are almost always ignored.
 
Zirias said:
I still think the one valid counter-argument is that it would draw discussion (and yes, a lot of it will be about potential bugs) away from the place the devs follow anyways: the mailing list. [...]
I just imagine it might lead to a lot of the following over and over again:
  • Explaining people (newbies?) no, it doesn't mean "the latest and greatest"
  • Discussing "broken" upgrades with people who don't think about a rollback strategy
  • (IMHO worst) telling people to take their problem to the ML or bugzilla
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#1 and #2 will be the "educating part"; we're doing that already here for #1 but both might be increased substantially. I agree that #3 will most likely be the lot of things but, one problem that might come up is that the ML (less so perhaps for PRs generated) might be flooded with (vague?) messages to the extent that it will take extra time & attention away of the dev-s as compared to the messages in the -CURRENT ML at the moment.

I think it will be an experiment that might also mean more moderating.

___
P.S. as to your pinned post: yes indeed, perhaps something like "DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters" ;)
 
Erichans said:
#1 and #2 will be the "educating part"; we're doing that already here for #1 but both might be increased substantially.
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With these, it depends on the "quality" I guess. What might make sense for a -CURRENT section on the forums, because there isn't a better suited official home already, could be:
  • Help people to make informed decisions whether their use case would indeed be a good one for -CURRENT
  • Discuss good strategies how to keep a -CURRENT system up to date without too much breakage
  • Maybe help with building and customizing
  • (...?)
But still I'd expect a lot of repetitive explanations about what -CURRENT isn't (especially: stable, secure, ...).

Erichans said:
one problem that might come up is that the ML (less perhaps PRs generated) might be flooded with (vague?) messages
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That's already happening. But having a -CURRENT section might of course encourage even more people to try it for the wrong reasons. On the one hand, you want as many people as possible to run -CURRENT, so you get better manual testing coverage. But then, these people need to be willing and capable to analyze and report bugs...

Erichans said:
P.S. as to your pinned post:
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The wording wasn't by accident :cool: – and "DON'T PANIC" is helpful with running -CURRENT for sure, hehe.
 
Zirias said:
I just imagine it might lead to a lot of the following over and over again:
  • Explaining people (newbies?) no, it doesn't mean "the latest and greatest"
  • Discussing "broken" upgrades with people who don't think about a rollback strategy
  • (IMHO worst) telling people to take their problem to the ML or bugzilla
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Exactly. That is already happening with people who are running current and are participating in discussions.
  • Nearly all of them do not have the correct answer to "why are you running current". Importantly, "I want to be up-to-date" is not the correct answer, nor is "my GPU would otherwise be unsupported", because it is not supported in current, since current is by definition unsupported. Most users of current are not interested with helping in testing current.
  • A lot of questions from people running current are about user errors, or lack of sys admin skills. These experiences are not valid alpha-testing of current.
  • And if testers find real problems in current, discussing them here is a waste of time.
    [/quote]

    If we have a subforum for current, most questions posted there should be answered with "either isolate the bug and post it on the mailing list, or stop using current".
 
ralphbsz said:
… Most users of current are not interested with helping in testing current. …
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Evidence?

Food for thought:

1643823834737.png
 
grahamperrin said:
Evidence?
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Experience from seeing lots of threads of the type
"X or Y doesn't work"
What version are you running? "Current"
Why are you running an alpha test version? "Want to be up to date" or "Want to have a new feature"
How did you get to the problem? "Don't know"
Please try a reboot, or a reinstall, or actually configure it correctly. "Now it magically works"

This is not testing of a new software version.

If all users of current that write about here were thorough, did good analysis of problems, and communicated the problems they found via the bug tracker or the mailing lists, then having a place to chat about current would be good. But those users are, as far as I see, by far the minority. In this situation, giving people a place to talk about current just creates more frustration in users, and wastes time of people trying to help.

I'm starting to think that instead of pointing out that we don't discuss current here (like SirDice correctly does, regularly), we should go further: We should ask people to not use current, unless they want to be thorough alpha testers.
 
grahamperrin said:
That's not evidence; not statistical.
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In order to provide statistical numbers you first have know how many FreeBSD installs are "out there". I'll give you hint, nobody knows what that number is. So you're asking for proof that cannot be given.

But if I go by the roughly 14 years I've been on this forum and the 22 years I've been using FreeBSD, I'd say ralphbsz is spot on.
 
Thanks. I have to go by what I see. I imagine that the CURRENT UX in 2022 differs considerably from the CURRENT UX in 2000 ;-)
 
eternal_noob said:
I think the number of active forum accounts provides a better basis for this calculation. How many are there?
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Can't tell. Can only tell you how many registered users we have. But that also includes dormant accounts, sleeper spam bots, etc.
 
I'm fairly certain Reddit has its fair share of dormant accounts too. I have a Reddit account, it's a member of that group. Never use it, I think I have two posts to my name. Intended to lurk but never do that either.
 
SirDice said:
This is primarily a user support forum. People with the knowledge and skill to run -CURRENT don't need user support. There are very few developers on the forums, so your issues with a certain -CURRENT revision or change is likely to go unanswered here.
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this is a bad way of thinking. I mean,to cut people in so sharply categories. There are for sure a good amount of people with a medium level of knowledge. Medium could also mean medium low and medium high. I have a medium low level,but I like to do experiments. These experiments can also be related to CURRENT because it adequately satisfies my curiosity and it represents a good challenge for my intellect.
 
"-CURRENT should be considered the playground for FreeBSD developers, and for 'adventurous users' who don't mind that their system breaks. These users typically do not require any help to get their systems back into a working state."

"There are very few developers on the forums, and the amount of 'regular users' routinely running -CURRENT who are willing and able to lend support is likely in the single digits"

"You should really only install -CURRENT if you're prepared to participate in fact-finding and troubleshooting sessions with the FreeBSD developers on the freebsd-current mailing list. The forums lack the knowledge and resources to answer in-depth questions about new developments and their ramifications."

Not seeing any compelling arguments against these reasons, here.
 
"… The forums lack the knowledge and resources to answer in-depth questions about new developments and their ramifications."
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Reality:
  • there's also the lack of knowledge and resources to answer in-depth questions about a variety of other things.
 
SirDice said:
I'm fairly certain Reddit has its fair share of dormant accounts too.
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I guess, more dormant there than here.

SirDice said:
I have a Reddit account, it's a member of that group. Never use it, I think I have two posts to my name. Intended to lurk but never do that either.
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Comparably, but on a smaller scale, I might have spent years neither posting nor lurking here. It certainly felt like years.
 
I personally like the idea of a sub-forum for CURRENT. It's easier to search through than a mailing list archive. It also could be a good place to teach someone the ropes of the development process - right now, the information is a bit scattered, and it can be difficult to connect the dots. I would liken the Forums here to a university campus - yeah, a university is a place to learn. But, a university is also a place for research and development. And students who hang around the campus and go to classes would have a much easier time gaining exposure to research and development the university does.
 
ralphbsz said:
Importantly, "I want to be up-to-date" is not the correct answer, nor is "my GPU would otherwise be unsupported", because it is not supported in current, since current is by definition unsupported.
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I don't agree with the second part, it's a non-sequitur slightly disguised by wording, where two very different kinds of "support" (technical vs operational) are actually meant.

Hardware support can be a valid reason to run -CURRENT on one specific machine, given of course you understand what you're doing. Actually, that's how I started using FreeBSD at all, I first wanted to get a feeling for the system on my desktop and that only worked with 11-CURRENT.

Even my current use-case for -CURRENT (I run it in a VM dedicated to testing and development of ports) isn't actively hunting for bugs. It's not forbidden to run -CURRENT without doing so. What it boils down to is, running -CURRENT, you must
  • clearly understand the implications of its experimental/development nature and be able to make an informed decision
  • be prepared to run into bugs and have an idea how to deal with it
  • have the technical knowledge to fix (smaller) issues yourself
The main concern about a forum section for -CURRENT is that most of the traffic would show a lack of at least one of these bullet-points. The best-case scenario for such a section would be that it might help to teach about these things. The worst-case scenario would be the same answers over and over again.
 
I have reserved a disk for the CURRENT and I boot it through bhyve. If it breaks hardly,I can wipe everything and restart. Are there enough people experienced that can help with the problems of the CURRENT ? because it is technical,so there could be an high number of advanced help requests.
 
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