Five year support for a release every two years still means three balls in the air.
Yes. Although this is probably better characterized as "two balls actively being thrown and one ball on its way down", since we've never done new point releases in the last year of a major branch (and I doubt that will change).
No dedicated timeline for minor releases. Could still be 13 months between 11.1 and 11.2.
Correct. We decided many years ago that FreeBSD worked better if we did releases "when they were ready" rather than working to a calendar. I'm sure OpenBSD's schedule works well for OpenBSD, but our projects are quite different (e.g., OpenBSD development is more centralized in a small number of hands).
Doesn't address question of what actually gets back ported. Will new em updates go into stable?
FreeBSD is a volunteer project. Updates get merged if someone merges them. Aside from policy restrictions, which are not changing (e.g., we won't merge ABI or API-breaking changes, because we insist on supporting third-party software), it's entirely up to people having the time and interest.
Five years seems like a long time to support an OS release, especially for a volunteer project. Do you know if there was any consideration/discussion around a shorter lifecycle (like 3 or 4 years)?
Yes, there have been people who want to reduce the support timeline. There are also people (mostly vendors who build products on FreeBSD, but also companies which run lots of FreeBSD servers) who wanted a longer support timeline.
Like most things, five years was a compromise. :-)
Yes. Although this is probably better characterized as "two balls actively being thrown and one ball on its way down", since we've never done new point releases in the last year of a major branch (and I doubt that will change).
No dedicated timeline for minor releases. Could still be 13 months between 11.1 and 11.2.
Correct. We decided many years ago that FreeBSD worked better if we did releases "when they were ready" rather than working to a calendar. I'm sure OpenBSD's schedule works well for OpenBSD, but our projects are quite different (e.g., OpenBSD development is more centralized in a small number of hands).
Doesn't address question of what actually gets back ported. Will new em updates go into stable?
FreeBSD is a volunteer project. Updates get merged if someone merges them. Aside from policy restrictions, which are not changing (e.g., we won't merge ABI or API-breaking changes, because we insist on supporting third-party software), it's entirely up to people having the time and interest.