Daemonic Dispatches

FreeBSD 4.11, 6.0 EoLs

I posted the following text to the FreeBSD-Stable, FreeBSD-Security, FreeBSD-Announce, and FreeBSD-Security-Notifications lists yesterday; in the interest of maximizing the number of people who read it, I'm reposting it here:

The branches supported by the FreeBSD Security Officer have been
updated to reflect recent EoL (end-of-life) events.  The new list is
below and at <URL: http://security.freebsd.org/ >.  FreeBSD 4.11 and
FreeBSD 6.0 have `expired' and are no longer supported effective
February 1, 2007.  Discussions concerning FreeBSD releases which are
no longer supported should take place on the freebsd-eol@freebsd.org
mailing list.

This marks the end of support by the FreeBSD Security Team for the
FreeBSD 4-STABLE branch, two years after FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE and
almost seven years after FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE.   For an explanation of
the rationale behind the EoL of FreeBSD 4.11 (and the 4-STABLE branch),
please see my earlier mailing list post on this subject:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2006-October/004111.html

At this point, support for running software from the ports tree on
FreeBSD 4.x is ceasing:  Packages for binary installations will no
longer be built for FreeBSD 4.11, building ports from source on FreeBSD
4.x will no longer be supported, and the ports INDEX will no longer be
built and made available via portsnap or the 'make fetchindex' target.
Patches for individual ports specific for their functioning on FreeBSD
4.11 may still be accepted at the discretion of the port maintainer.

FreeBSD 4.x will probably go down in history as being both one of the most successful FreeBSD -STABLE branches, and also as one which lived the longest after it ought to have died. It's no exaggeration to say that people on the FreeBSD security team have been looking forward to this point for two years; FreeBSD 4.x was great for its time, but its time has now passed. FreeBSD 6.2 is faster, more scalable, more stable, easier to maintain, has more driver support, and is more secure than FreeBSD 4.x; if you haven't upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

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