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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

What is causing this to be a major release vs not just being a point release?

Genuinely curious, since I can't gleam that from skimming the release notes.

I suspect your question is essentially "why is this 14.0, and not 13.3?" And the answer to that question is that this is a new release from our development branch, not an update to an existing branch used for the 13.x releases.

FreeBSD 14.0 represents over two and a half years of feature development, stability and security improvements, and bug fixes. Some of these changes were cherry-picked into the stable/13 branch and were included in the FreeBSD 13.1 and FreeBSD 13.2 minor releases built from there.

A sibling comment notes that APIs or ABIs may change between major versions. This is true, but this is not the reason for a new major version. Rather, ABI and API changes are allowed during the development cycle on the main branch, but are not cherry-picked into the existing stable branches.

I have a proposed change to include in the release notes some significant changes that happened to have been merged into 13.x already, and so far have been excluded from 14.0's notes: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D42546

Thanks so much.

And really appreciate all you & the other FreeBSD developers do.

Question: I’d be curious to hear your take on below (with the exception of the better defaults blog topic, since I see your comment history on that).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886507

APIs are stable with-in major version numbers. Major releases allow for API/ABI alterations.

* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/porters-handbook/versions/

Understood, but I'm not seeing what API/ABI breaking changes occurred hence why I ask.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

The "Runtime Libraries and API" section doesn't indicate any breaking changes, nor am I seeing it anywhere else in the release notes.

* 004: 14.0-CURRENT after kernel interfaces for dispatching cryptographic operations were changed.

* 008: 14.0-CURRENT after changing the internal KAPI between the krpc and NFS modules.

* 010: 14.0-CURRENT after changing the sndstat(4) ioctls nvlist schema and definitions.

* 022: 14.0-CURRENT after commit e1a907a25cfa changed the internal KAPI between the krpc and nfsserver modules.

* 026: 14.0-CURRENT after changing the internal KAPI between the nfscommon and nfsd modules.

* 037: 14.0-CURRENT after removal of thread argument from VOP_STAT(9) and fo_stat.

* 043: 14.0-CURRENT after removing the unused thread argument from NDINIT(9).

* 054: 14.0-CURRENT after changing irq_work_queue to return a bool in LinuxKPI to match 5.10 API.

* 062: 14.0-CURRENT after struct kinfo_file changes.

* 086: 14.0-CURRENT after vn_lock_pair() argument changes.

See:

* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/porters-handbook/versions/

Kernel APIs are also part of the stability guarantee (unlike Linux).

One such changes is moving from OpenSSL 1.x to OpenSSL 3 in the base system, due to OpenSSL 1.x going EOL. That's one of the things that caused this release to take so long.

Breaking changes are allowed, not required.

Deprecations such as mergemaster do not occur with point releases.

There's more, but that's the first thing that comes to mind.

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