# Why no "End of Support" announcements for FreeBSD 10?



## recluce (Nov 6, 2018)

I was wondering why there was no announcement regarding the end of support for FreeBSD 10.4, 10-RELEASE and 10-STABLE ?

Usually, EOLs are announced through:

Mailing Lists
FreeBSD news ticker
FreeBSD web site
Forum
This time, none of the above, which I find surprising. Is there a reason here that I am missing?


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## SirDice (Nov 6, 2018)

Because they're nowhere near EoL yet. As 10.4 is likely to be the last of the 10 branch it's going to have 2 year support. Schedule currently shows one year.


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## recluce (Nov 6, 2018)

The Lifecycle page on the website listed 10.4 and the 10-branch as end of life on October 31, 2018 and removed it from the list of supported releases on Nov. 1:  FreeBSD Supported Releases and added 10.4 to the list of unsupported releases: FreeBSD Unsupported Releases

So if you are right (and the lack of announcements would support you), the website is wrong and would need to be corrected.


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## SirDice (Nov 6, 2018)

Yeah, I'd like to see some official stance on 10 too. Some official announcement 10.4 is the last of the 10 branch, or not. But it's been awfully quiet in this respect. 

I shot off an email to secteam@ asking them what the deal is. I'm guessing it was mistakenly moved to "unsupported" (probably due to some automated script) because the end date was never updated.


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## SirDice (Nov 7, 2018)

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I got a response and an explanation, the bad news is that 10.4 is indeed EoL and it's the end of the 10 branch and therefor all support on it. 

The 10.4 release notes did already mention the EoL and the end of the 10 branch. But the wording left some ambiguity and it wasn't entirely clear 10.4 was actually a special case. It was supposed to be a minor stop gap release to bridge the time towards 12.0-RELEASE. As such it was decided that even though it was the last of a major branch it would only receive the normal 1 year support. In my opinion this could have been worded more clearly. The announcement of the impending EoL of 10.4 probably fell between the cracks and was missed too.


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## recluce (Nov 7, 2018)

I hope the secteam will consider this a "lesson learned". Not matter what the life span of a release, there should be no ambiguity about it. Thank you for obtaining a clear message!


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