How much to remove from UPDATING (was: Re: git: ff0c7816db69 - main - Remove UPDATING entries from old branches.)

Alexander Leidinger <[email protected]> Sun, 27 Nov 2022 22:35:31 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.os.freebsd.architechture
Message-ID	<20221127223531.Horde.3qMyxtWhJEa3tXdg500ge5g@webmail.leidinger.net>

Quoting Warner Losh <[email protected]> (from Fri, 25 Nov 2022 09:41:28 -0700):

> Please revert this. We keep older updating entries on purpose. You purged
> way too much. Let's chat about how much to remove in arch@. They are for
> more than just source updates, so your reasoning is wrong. They are also
> there for users updating their products which can have a larger leap in
> time. We've traditionally kept closer to 5-10 years here for that reason.

Reverted.

UPDATING as far back as stable/10 (= 4 major updates) is a little bit  
excessive (more than 9 years of development work so far), isn't it?

I don't get the "more than just src updates" part. If we don't talk  
about the source code, isn't src/UPATING not the wrong place to store  
it?

In terms of updating products, I understand that updating them every 2  
years may be a little bit expensive/excessive for some vendors, but  
taking every UPDATING from every stable branch in-between doesn't look  
too much time consuming to me. And compared to the huge amount of  
changes between N-2 and N... taking UPDATING from all stable branches  
in-beteen is nothing. Nevertheless, 4-5 years I consider OK-ish,  
nearly 10 years is ... ugh ... a life-time or two in the computer  
world. If we look e.g. at the PlayStation (yes, just one of the  
products which has FreeBSD inside, but personally I consider it one of  
the more stable ones than some network products which have a shorter  
shelf-time than the PS-line from an OS-version-tracking point of  
view), there are around 6 years in-between models, and they surely  
haven't started developing a month before the release date.

So where do we draw the line for UPDATING, 2 major versions (~4  
years), 3 major versions (~6 years)? ~10 years (~5 major versions)  
looks overly excessive to me. That's not something you want to try to  
catch up, that's rather a new development than a catch-up.

Bye,
Alexander.

> On Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 2:23 AM Alexander Leidinger <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> The branch main has been updated by netchild:
>>
>> URL:
>> https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/src/commit/?id=ff0c7816db696d31adc437134dcad45a70ad5889
>>
>> commit ff0c7816db696d31adc437134dcad45a70ad5889
>> Author:     Alexander Leidinger <[email protected]>
>> AuthorDate: 2022-11-25 09:17:14 +0000
>> Commit:     Alexander Leidinger <[email protected]>
>> CommitDate: 2022-11-25 09:17:14 +0000
>>
>>     Remove UPDATING entries from old branches.
>>
>>     We only support updates from major version N to N+1:
>>     stable/13 was branched on 20210122, remove all old entries from
>> stable/10
>>     branch point in 2013 to 20210122.

[~2k lines trimmed]
-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net [email protected]: PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF
http://www.FreeBSD.org    [email protected]  : PGP 0x8F31830F9F2772BF

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 851 B)