Yes, that is what it says on paper, but I would submit that both 5.x and 7x were essentially EOL the day they came out. Since 4.x there has been a huge focus o

Yes, that is what it says on paper, but I would submit that both 5.x and 7x were essentially EOL the day they came out. Since 4.x there has been a huge focus on the upcoming releases. By the time the x.0 release comes out, all of the cool kids are working hard on x+1 and x+2 - you saw this especially during 8.0 and 8.1 when a lot of mailing list chatter from core developers revolved around nitty gritty details of 10.x. By the time 7.1 came out (for instance) all new driver bug fixes, etc., stopped being applied to the 7 tree and the answer to every question was "it will be in (8/9)". I do appreciate the fact that an 8.4 was created - it's a step in the right direction and a sign of some real understanding of the problems the end users are having with an inability to invest in FreeBSD and make long-term plans with their own platforms. However, I still would like to see a release ... any release ... get to x.10 or x.11 - like 4 did. I even committed $50k to that end a few years ago (although I suppose that's small fries these days :) If people would like to know my specific critiques, there was a long mailing list discussion in 2012: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037294.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Janu...