release schedule and Linux distros

[PÁLI Gábor János]

Hi Mark,

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:38 AM, Mark Lentczner <mark at glyphic.com> wrote:
> I think we're all in agreement that sync'ing against the calendars of other
> distros that have similar calendar based releases is a good thing.

I agree absolutely, however, I am not sure that you will like the way
releases are currently implemented for FreeBSD :-)  One can find some
information about the upcoming releases at the Release Engineering
Information page [1], but usually they do not point that far advance
in time.  For example, currently 9.1 is being scheduled, and maybe it
will appear around September or so -- but no one really knows that
yet.

On the other hand, ported applications are handled in a relatively
flexible way, i.e. there is a few weeks of "ports freeze" (when no
changes affecting large number of ports are allowed, e.g. updating
GHC) at around each release (to let the ports management team build
packages for the release), otherwise it is fine to update HP there.

Obviously, users of releases will only get the latest committed
version in the ports tree at the time when the release in question is
prepared.  But it is a common practice to update the ports tree and
track updates continuously.


[1] http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html