Although FreeBSD 5.3 looked like it was going to hit official release status recently, more issues have come up that are pushing that date back. I had considered mentioning this the other day, but I figured most people who were really interested in what was going on would already know about it. I should know better than that by now. I caught this entry on the DragonFly BSD development blog that in turn points to another blog entry which caught the cvs commit about the 5.3 release being pushed back. That in and of itself is not really any big deal, but this person goes on to complain about the FreeBSD development model becoming “a lot more closed about what is really going on”. I have to admit that I was rather disappointed to see this. I was going to respond by leaving a comment on that blog entry, but it requires a registration to do so. Forget that, so I’m posting my response here and hoping that either PingBack to the blog entry works of that person finds this some other way. Now more to my point, there are lots of ways to keep informed with what is going on in FreeBSD land:
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Mailing Lists, specifically:
- freebsd-current: Bleeding edge topics (usally).
- freebsd-hackers: Tech topics.
- cvs-all: Every CVS commit made to FreeBSD, great for browsing through.
- FreeBSD Internal Pages, especially the release engineering section, where you can find:
- FreeBSD Problem Reports
If after monitoring theses resources you still don’t have clear idea of how to help, try asking one of the release engineering team members. These folks usually have a pretty good feel for the pulse of the project and what is needed. If you have skills/resources/time that you want to put towards FreeBSD and don’t know where to look there is someone who can give you some suggestions.
As for what is happening right now with the 5.3 release, Scott Long sent an email to the freebsd-current list describing what is going on. Bottom line version, some additional issues have popped up and they want to make sure they are resolved before 5.3 hits release status. This is fine with me because I want to see each release be as good as can be. I’ve got some projects at work that will make use of 5.3 once it hits release, so I’m as anxious as the next person for it finally be done, but I’m certainly willing to wait a little longer if it means squashing some serious bugs.