Garrett Wollman <wollman_at_bimajority.org> wrote on Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:09:47 UTC :
> <<On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 11:36:51 -0700, Adrian Chadd <adr...@freebsd.org> said: > > > If everyone over-indexes on stable/15 wifi stability, ABI, KBI, etc, then > > you're going to > > see one of two things: > > I don't use wireless (or laptops generally) under FreeBSD but I think > it's pretty clear that modernized wireless support is a huge priority > for many laptop users, and I think the project needs to make progress > on this front to remain relevant. > > Given that stable/14 is expected to last until 2028, and 16.0 is > scheduled for the end of 2027, it seems that there is a reaonable > compromise: users who cannot accept the possibility of disruption > should stick with 14. Presumably there will be a point in 2026 or > 2027 when the wireless team will be able to say "ok, that's it, no > more breaking changes will be merged to stable/15", and those who held > back will want to upgrade then -- stable/15 will still have a > substantial support runway (another three years at least). > > The one thing that seems particularly important to me: making certain > that traditional source-based upgrades from releng/1[45].* to > releng/15.* continue to work. This might require building and > installing some userland utilities (like ifconfig and wpa-supplicant) > with the new kernel but old libc to make the transition feasible. I > don't know to what extent this needs to be automated, but it does need > to be documented thoroughly. (I guess it would be easier if all users > were on ZFS with boot environments, but that's not the case.) No one should bias what FreeBSD does based on my usage pattern, but the below may be somewhat more general. It is also illustrated with an over specific example, but one I'd be interested in. If 15 is going to be significantly more problematical to deal with (avoiding the word unstable), will some stable/1* that is avoiding the temporary problem rate also avoid unusually long periods of not updating the likes, of, for example, llvm, including the likes of 20 -> 21 and such? (More generally: Update some contributed materials that are not normally security updates but tend to get updates over time, even if not much else changes part of the time?) === Mark Millard marklmi at yahoo.com
