14.1-RELEASE EOL, Quarterly Packages

[Barney]

Your hardware, you decide whether to install the latest updates or not. There's no obligation and no real pressure to upgrade every time there's a new release. Some users prefer to have smoother upgrades, so they are willing to put in the time and effort to do it often. Yeah, there are benefits to doing it like that - those benefits don't necessarily make sense for other users.

I don't upgrade until my installation of Firefox says, "I can't handle the Internet any more, upgrade me or else!". This is the moment that prompts me to clean out my machine and install up-to-date software from scratch. Reasoning behind such a policy - I don't want to sink time into upgrading every time there's a new release. And no, I don't want a constant flow of updates, either.

Announcing an “EOL” is to some extent pressure. Sir Dice won’t help you (and will scold you) if you even mention something that’s “EOL’. It’s absurd. I still have a server running 9.1with Apache 2.2. Up 770 days. Runs just as well as the day I put it up..FreeBSD 10 sucked. FreeBSD 11 stunk. No need to upgrade to something that isn’t better than what you’re using.

And the entire point of major releases is that you don’t need to upgrade things if you don’t need to. I’ll just install a 14.3 kernel on my 14.1 system. To me, there’s no difference between 14.1-STABLE and 14.4. It’s just 14 with a bunch of updates and patches. A “release” is just a STABLE snapshot within a major.

 

[diizzy]

For good reasons, "working" (in terms of "appears" to be working as expected) isn't always the case and you have the whole security approach where your current software might execute code you likely don't want it to. You also very likely won't be able to get support if anything goes wrong running "unsupported" software as most value time and wont setup up an ancient environment to troubleshoot unless you're lucky and its also reproducable on current versions but don't expect backports.

 

[thedaemon]

I never understood this "supported" software in the OSS community. There is no support for any open source projects as far as I know. Just the communities helping each other out. So all OSS is unsupported and I'm tired of that as an argument.

Now what I think is meant by "support" is : accepting bug reports. That's not support. Not at all, never has been, never will be. That's fixing bugs, not assisting in using software. Well that's just my silly 2 cents on the matter.

 

[kpedersen]

accepting bug reports. That's not support. Not at all, never has been, never will be.

That's lucky because otherwise Microsoft couldn't claim that Windows is actually supported

This is basically par for the casual Windows community these days. Weak support forums, and a buggy bug reporter.

 

[mer]

Specifically for FreeBSD, "supported" means security related patches for -RELEASE branches. FreeBSD -CURRENT is by definition "supported" because that is the active development HEAD.
Bug reports can be written against anything, accepting is more "we acknowledge that is a bug on that branch, but it may be fixed on another"

"...assisting in using software..." FreeBSD as a project is comprised of volunteers; noone assists in using the software.
What FreeBSD has always had is what other projects call "Community Support". You ask questions on a mailing list, you post a new thread here and someone with the time and knowledge may or may not responsd.

If you are paying $2000USD per year for "support" like QuickBooks that is a different arrangement. FreeBSD has never charged anyone a fee for "support"

 

[astyle]

Yeah, with Windows, 'support' really means 'security updates', but it can also mean 'some assurances of program compatibility'. If you try to install Office 365 on Win7, then you're basically on your own, there won't be any hotfix patches to fix things if the installation messes up something on your machine. Even if Office365 actually runs OK.

With Open Source, it's actually very similar - it's probably not impossible to install KDE 6 on FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. But it's a lot of work to fight past compiler errors and to patch the code so that components this far apart in age can cooperate on the same machine. Another case where hotfix patches are... not gonna come. It may be not impossible to compile KDE 6 on say, 13.2-RELEASE, then the KDE project can claim to support FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE and later versions...