On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Jo Rhett wrote:
Please stop avoiding even considering what people are offering to you.
So far, this conversation has largely consisted of you telling us that you
don't like what we're doing and demanding that we change. Let's consider
three more productive avenues by which you can offer assistance with the
problem of how to increase branch support lifetimes:
(1) Become a contributor to the community by developing and maintaining
patches against unsupported branches, especially against older releases
such as 4.x and 5.x where the branches are open for commits but have
fallen out of support status. I can't promise the results will
immediately fall into the official project "umbrella", but consider Colin
Percival's freebsd-update as an example of what can be accomplished by
someone outside the project when they find a niche. What started out as
an external software project (freebsd-update) is now a core system update
tool, and Colin has gone from being a random guy with some code to our
security officer.
(2) Become a contributor to the community by identifying members of the
existing developer team for whom additional funding would enable them to
spend more time working on and supporting FreeBSD and providing that
funding. Consider approaching the FreeBSD Foundation formally to seek
matching grant funding for the project.
(3) Become a contributor to the community by working with an existing or new
company that provides support for FreeBSD commercially, and discussing
with them ways that they could provide support for branches past their
official EoL date for the project. Companies like FreeBSD Mall have
strong relationships with the project, and in the past have contributed
significantly to efforts such as release engineering. It's not hard to
imagine a company along those lines using something along th elines of a
support subscription to fund community-centered support for branches. And
those companies may be able to help you identify developers who can do the
work, as well as play an active role in seeking further customers with
similar interests.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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