Re: Seeking an extended-support O/S similar to FreeBSD

2013-03-29 Thread Michael Wayne
On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 07:31:50PM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
 
 Every other minor release of FreeBSD is supported for 2 full years, with no
 new features added, just security fixes (aka Extended Releases).
 
 And every major release of FreeBSD is supported for at least 4, somtimes 5,
 years.

That's exactly the issue.  After 4-5 years, there's nothing.

 RedHat isn't much better. Sure, they'll support the core OS for 5 years,
 but you can't install new, up-to-date software on it unless you upgrade the
 entire OS (been down that road too many times to ever want to try again).
 We gave up on RedHat after fighting with 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x.

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback.

 FreeBSD isn't perfect (what OS is?), but it's amazing that you can install
 the newest versions of MySQL, Firefox, KDE, Postfix, etc on 7.4 (until the
 end of Feb, anyway), or 8.3, or 9.0, or 9.1. And can continue to get
 security fixes for all those releases (except 7.x now).

That's no help at all to a bunch of machines that started life on
4.1 back in 2000 and will continue to run another 10-15 years, is
it?  What's your suggestion for dealing with that? It's not like
anything currently supported is gonna fit on those machines without
a rediculous amount of effort.

 What's missing from FreeBSD support?

Having one release supported for an extended time. It would be
insane to consider maintaining every release for an extended period
but ONE release, supported for an extended period (decades) would
really help.  We're far enough down the security path that there
are not that many security vulnerabilities in base. Ports generally
build just fine on older versions.  
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Seeking an extended-support O/S similar to FreeBSD

2013-03-28 Thread Michael Wayne
I'm NOT trying to start a flame war here. I'm trying to find a
viable solution to a very frustrating, real problem. 

It's clear that FreeBSD has absolutely no interest in maintaining
an extended maintainence release version of the O/S. The high 
resource commitment required to keep up with the current incessant 
FreeBSD release process is beyond quite a number of people. I'm at
the point of admitting that FreeBSD is simply too much work for us  
to continue to use.

So, I'm wondering if anyone reading the list is aware of a viable
alternative. I'm seeking a BSD-based O/S that is designed to be
installed in a server environment and not ever get any feature
upgrades or require any noticable additional resources, only security
fixes for the O/S and ports.

While this concept is clearly in total opposition to the philosophy 
of the FreeBSD team, I'm hoping that some other, smaller project
might exist to fill this need. 

Any suggestions?
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