Aloha David,
I think the current process of having rolling-releases packages makes
unpredictable upgrades as we have to manually check if the upgrade
will be fine or not. When a user installs FreeBSD 11.0 on its system,
it probably expects that everything will work fine until a next major
upgrade like 12.0. That's why I think we really should implement
branches for a specific FreeBSD version.
When FreeBSD 12.0 is released, we should create a ports branch that
will contains only fixes (such as security advisories, crash fixes and
such). No minor or major upgrades until a new 13.0 version is
released. This is the only way to make safe upgrades.
The discussions did go on for a while, but lets get more technical.
While i can understand your use case, it raises various questions:
- How should be EOL-Software handled? For example PHP 5.6, Typo3 7,
PostgreSQL 9.2 and many more will expire long before FreeBSD 11 expires
but are still valid (or even default version) when created. Since the
versions are frozen, how should - at least- security issues handled?
[Yes, i read that a user can switch at its own risk to another branch,
but lets assume he is very fine with the version (because i have such
customer)]
- How should be new dependencies handled? GitLab for example sometimes
*requieres* updates of its dependencies in order to fix security issues.
- Same as above: how should be dropped dependencies handled? In worst
case we need to maintain them for nearly 5 years, but nobody (should)
use them
- How to resolve conflicts? I mentioned GitLab above and now realize,
that sometimes the GitLab update breaks for example www/redmine because
it depends at other versions than GitLab.
- Where do get the fixes from? We have around 26.000 ports which needs
fixes in worst case
- How to handle for example security issues only fixed through an
update? Which such a long time between "updates" it gets very very hard
to port/get/write patches in fast developing software. Wordpress or
Gitlab are typical examples with thousands of lines in code-changes
every update
- How to make the customer clear, that complains about the software
(old, outdated, missing features, unresolved bugs, etc) are intentional?
- Where to archive the distfiles? Sometimes upstream completely remove
them from everywhere they can.
And last: how to make updates from FreeBSD version to version easier?
Many user already have problems with single major updates. From my
experiences in Windows or Ubuntu LTS usages with such or very similar
version handling: the update, even of the OS, is pushed as far away as
possible, because of the big amount of work required, since everything
needs to checked/updated/changed.
I have a hard time to image, that is handled in another way by you. So
if you can me give more insight about your use-case i would be happy to
read it for a better understanding.
I have various customer requiring (and paying for) very old software
(for example still PHP 5.3). So i know some of there motivations, which
boils every time down to "its to expensive to upgrade our software" [but
they don't mean expensive in money]. So maybe we can make something happen.
Greetings,
Torsten
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