Re: Production readiness and upgrading from FreeBSD 4.11

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 03:57:16AM -0400, Jeff Duffy wrote:
> 1. The most important question is when will the DragonFly team consider 
> the OS 'production quality'? This may be now, but I've read Matt 
> Dillon's various quotes and interviews with interest, and he's said on 
> a few occasions that companies may want to wait a bit before 
> converting. We're feeling the end of support for the 4.x tree closing 
> in, and we need to make a decision soon about what to do about it.

The biggest reason "to wait a bit" is that the system is still changing
a lot. After the big number of kernel changes in the last months,
we are now working on some important userland issues. This means that
from time to time, the PREVIEW/STABLE tag will show some major
changes. For example, the next time the tag is slipped, all major
versions have increased and you'll most likely want to rebuild all
ports. It's normally not so much a problem of testing, but you should
keep this in mind when doing updates.

> 2. The "Upgrading from FreeBSD 4" document references 4.9 as the most 
> recent version. Obviously quite a few things have changed in the 
> meantime, so is 'make upgrade' still a viable upgrade path? That 
> DragonFly has made easy upgrades from FreeBSD 4.x a priority warms my 
> heart :)

The update from most versions of 4.x to the 1.2 release should work.
If you have problems, please report them. We don't and can't support
upgrades to head without a lot of hassle, but updating from release 1.2
(or nearly release) to HEAD/PREVIEW is considered important.

> 3. We run jdk-1.4.2p6_7 compiled from ports. Is there any reason to 
> think this won't easily transfer to DragonFly? We have created our own 
> package, and rely heavily for the near future on Java and Tomcat until 
> our Python port is complete.

It should just work. You _might_ want to rebuild it, but it should not
be necessary.

Joerg