2.4.4 is looking to be big
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Nearly 200 issues, over 100 closed. Any plans to do more frequent and smaller releases or just a general judgement call and the kinds of issues should really be released mostly together?
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Version 2.4.4 will be a major pfSense update. See this blog post for more details https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-software-version-2-4-4-release-highlights.html
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Well, we had to get to FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE as a base, because 11.1 goes EOL 90 days after 11.2-RELEASE occurs, and we don't want to offer the community something that is based on an EOL version of FreeBSD.
And we had to get off PHP 5.6, because it goes EOL at the end of 2018, which means a ton of PHP had to be converted to more modern structures. This includes many packages that are normally "community maintained", but for one reason or another, the maintainer had conflicts that blocked them doing the work.
So Netgate headcount has done it, because offering a secure, stable version of pfSense to the community is still one of our top priorities.
And it's really no secret, but C3000 and ARM64 support are also included, as well as advancing our 32-bit ARM products.
So yes, it's a big release. They often are.
Given the amount of testing involved, I don't think "more frequent" releases would accomplish much more than Netgate spending even more to develop and maintain pfSense, and would risk burn-out of both the developers (internal and community) as well as the larger base of the pfSense community.
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Cool. Thanks for the info guys. I was trying to better understand the difficulties and reasoning.
Talk about back luck of timing with all of the EOLs. I can't wait!
