# FreeBSD 14.0 planning



## grahamperrin@ (Nov 9, 2021)

cyranno said:


> … Do you have an idea when version 14.0 will be available?



14.0-RELEASE some time in 2023, I guess.









						devsummit/planning.md at main · bsdjhb/devsummit
					

Contribute to bsdjhb/devsummit development by creating an account on GitHub.




					github.com
				




June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit: 14 0 Planning - YouTube

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history>


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## Jose (Nov 9, 2021)

> Things we might like to deprecate for 14.0.  Further discussion may be required to reach consensus.
> ...
> 
> 
> sendmail!! (emaste)


Wow!


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## eternal_noob (Nov 9, 2021)

It's time. The initial release of sendmail was 38 years ago. That's ancient.


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## jbo (Nov 9, 2021)

> DRM in base for amd64/armv7/arm64


So in 14.0, graphics/drm-kmod is becoming part of base?


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## Jose (Nov 9, 2021)

jbodenmann said:


> So in 14.0, graphics/drm-kmod is becoming part of base?


Hm, not so far... Maybe they mean the kernel bits to support Linux DRM?


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## kpedersen (Nov 9, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> It's time. The initial release of sendmail was 38 years ago. That's ancient.


That doesn't bode well for the operating system itself which is also pretty old


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 9, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> It's time. The initial release of sendmail was 38 years ago. That's ancient.


Age is no indicator of quality or lack of it.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 9, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Age is no indicator of quality.


True, but being old doesn't automatically mean it's good.



> On the negative side, sendmail has acquired a certain amount of cruft (old code) over its long history, with the result that it has a reputation of being insecure and bloated.
> ...
> As for the “bloatware” charge, it's true that sendmail has a much larger code base than other MTAs such as qmail and Postfix, and a larger RAM footprint too. This probably has at least as much to do with the fact that sendmail is monolithic (one executable provides most of sendmail's functionality) as it does with cruft.
> ...
> Sendmail also is criticized for its complexity. The syntax of its configuration file, sendmail.cf, is non-instinctive to say the least—in my opinion, its difficulty ranks somewhere between C programming and regular expressions.








						Hardening Sendmail | Linux Journal
					






					www.linuxjournal.com


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## msplsh (Nov 9, 2021)

Sendmail is cryptic which contributes to its reputation for being difficult to configure.  If they replace it with something simpler, that would be fine with me.  I would assume you could just install Sendmail from ports if you really love it, as I rip it out and put Postfix in its place.  I would prefer they _didn't_ replace it with Postfix, though, as being in ports frees it from constraints that Base might need.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 9, 2021)

Why do you need an MTA in base anyway? Mail is insecure, gets monitored by the NSA and nobody uses it anymore.


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## msplsh (Nov 9, 2021)

It's for local delivery and to support the mail(1) command that has been in unix since the dawn of time?


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## eternal_noob (Nov 9, 2021)

Ok, if you're a sysadmin and have 39485793 cron jobs running, it may make sense if they can send you mail if something is wrong. But as a casual user, i don't like the system sending me mail.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 9, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> True, but being old doesn't automatically mean it's good.


Yes and you replied before I finished editing my comment agreeing with that. But any attempts to remove something based on age alone is misguided.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 9, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> But as a casual user, i don't like the system sending me mail.


sendmail has nothing to do with whether you want mail or not. Most systems, if not all, have some built in method for sending you mail or alerts of some sort.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 9, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> But any attempts to remove something based on age alone is misguided.


Yes, you're right. But removing something because it's bloated, insecure and complex is justified.



drhowarddrfine said:


> Most systems, if not all, have some built in method for sending you mail or alerts of some sort.


Yes. But honestly, who reads that mail? I don't.

Btw:
I am currently on a Linux server system which doesn't have mail installed by default:

```
xxx@xxx:~$ mail
Command 'mail' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install mailutils
```


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 10, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> removing something because it's bloated, insecure and complex is justified.


Methinks there are many who will disagree with your opinion of sendmail.




eternal_noob said:


> honestly, who reads that mail? I don't.


I do but neither of us represent the thousands of others who use it and I'd bet most of them do.



eternal_noob said:


> I am currently on a Linux server system which doesn't have mail installed by default:


Let's not bring up Linux faults in this thread.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 10, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Methinks there are many who will disagree with your opinion of sendmail.


And many agree, see for example https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-to-stop-sendmail-100.79186/ or the abundance of tutorials on how to disable sendmail you find with Google.



drhowarddrfine said:


> do but neither of us represent the thousands of others who use it and I'd bet most of them do.


Yes, we can only speak for ourselves.



drhowarddrfine said:


> Let's not bring up Linux faults in this thread.


Sorry, i can see that this may be disturbing.


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## kpedersen (Nov 10, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> Yes. But honestly, who reads that mail? I don't.


If you have ever used a desktop environment that pops up with a notification that your download is done, you have new hardware added, etc.. This is effectively the same thing.

The terminal message of "you have new mail" is the UNIX way of doing notifications. The mail in this case is results of cron jobs, hardware changes, etc.

I think sendmail was a little overly complex for what it was and I am fine for it to be replaced. However, if they remove it without a replacement, I do see that more as a regression.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 10, 2021)

Just for the records, here is the most recent mail server survey:





						Mail (MX) Server Survey
					

Report on the types and numbers of mail (MX) servers on the internet.



					www.securityspace.com
				




```
Server Type 	Number of Servers 	Percent
Exim             291,497             60.25%
Postfix          158,999             32.86%
Sendmail         17,252               3.57%
```


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## gpw928 (Nov 10, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Methinks there are many who will disagree with your opinion of sendmail.


Yes.  A quick count shows nine copies of `sendmail` running across both Linux and FreeBSD hosts, and that's just the ones I use personally.

Getting status notifications about problems from utilities like sysutils/smartmontools actually matters to me, so I do run `smartcheck` from `cron` and read the emails.  The alternative is to let my systems fail hard.

`Sendmail` is certainly complex, but it addresses a complex task.  I am not aware of any broad-scale security issues, and the complexity issues are largely obfuscated for the casual user with pre-prepared configurations (change a couple of lines in freebsd.mc, and run `make`).  I must admit that I would consider using `postfix` for a greenfield.  However I am completely certain that `sendmail` furnishes functionality in esoteric circumstances where others would struggle.  So I hope and expect it will endure.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 10, 2021)

eternal_noob Never heard of that company. Only lists less than 500,000 MX servers. So there's that. I concur with gpw928 but would have also considered exim.

Toward the end of my web dev company, I was looking into postfix and exim. Postfix seemed to have a config file much like sendmail and didn't make me want to switch if I was only switching to the same thing.

We did a lot of interfacing with sendmail using C to keep track of visitors, users, customers, etc. It was the best method when we started out 18 years ago.


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## eternal_noob (Nov 10, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Only lists less than 500,000 MX servers.


Yes, not every mail server responds with a banner to be identified.


> As indicated by the above table, of the 857,797 servers queried, only 483,818 servers responded with a banner that allow us to identify the software being used. All of the remaining information in this report is based on the responses that allowed us to identify the software in use.


But there is a good chance that these aren't sendmail.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 10, 2021)

eternal_noob Point being, there are far more than 500K MX servers.


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## gpw928 (Nov 10, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> eternal_noob Point being, there are far more than 500K MX servers.


Yes, it is, at best, a few percent of Mail eXchangers on the Internet -- and there would be a great deal more Mail eXchangers hiding inside private networks.


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## scottro (Nov 10, 2021)

I feel like this thread is just folks venting. Nothing really wrong with that, but  those who want to work for something being included or excluded would probably have better results filing pr's. (Though I'm sure there's a pr for removing sendmail, adding postfix, etc.) 
RedHat did that several years ago, removing sendmail and adding postfix and while I know Linux bashing can waste another 20 posts, it hasn't hurt them, or even their reputation, which took lots more damage from a myriad of things. 

I do remember the old joke, someone, wanting to curse in irc posts something like
@$#E#*@%%@!!)

Someone else writes, Please don't post your sendmail configuration in channel.


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## ralphbsz (Nov 10, 2021)

[/QUOTE]





eternal_noob said:


> It's time. The initial release of sendmail was 38 years ago. That's ancient.


The initial release of Unix was about 50 years ago. The initial release of BSD somewhere between 40 and 45. Most insurances and banks run on an OS whose first release was ~60 years ago (IBM mainframe). I don't know exactly how to define the age of TCP/IP implementations, but it is about 50 years old (and Vint Cerf is still around, bright and cheerful).

Old does not mean bad. It does not automatically mean good, but it is usually correlated with good, since bad things tend to get washed away. How many people still use PrimOS or Banyan Vines?



eternal_noob said:


> Mail is insecure, gets monitored by the NSA and nobody uses it anymore.


Mail is only insecure if administered by clueless people. While I'm sure the NSA does its best to monitor e-mail, the underlying protocol smtps is as hard to spy on as https and ssh. And the claim that nobody uses it is made ridiculous by looking at my various mailboxes, which have dozens or hundreds of messages per day.



eternal_noob said:


> But removing something because it's bloated, insecure and complex is justified.


Of those three, only one applies to sendmail: It is certainly complex. But that is for a reason: It is exceedingly powerful. A lot of that power was needed in the early days (when we did things like tunneling uucp mail over bitnet, remember e-mail addresses that had to have @, % and ! to get there). It is neither bloated nor insecure when administered competently.


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## grahamperrin@ (Nov 10, 2021)

I haven't even begun to listen to, or read, what was linked 



jbodenmann said:


> So in 14.0, graphics/drm-kmod is becoming part of base?



It fell under the (June 2021) heading of things that _someone needs in the next two years to support a product or service_.

If/when it happens, this will be excellent. It's probably fair to describe the need as *widespread*. 

Most end users of graphics can _make do_ with the separation, but integration should (amongst other things) allow a broader audience to engage in testing of the base operating system in general.



grahamperrin said:


> …
> 
> From the Roadmap:



The people who work on graphics and PkgBase are, I think, amongst the unsung heroes of FreeBSD.


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## Jose (Nov 10, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> How many people still use PrimOS or Banyan Vines?


Never heard of PrimOS, but Banyan Vines is one of the few that got away. Never got console time on one of those. The other one I'm curious about to this day is BeOS. I happened to work in the same office that was BeOS's headquarters years ago. I felt unworthy.


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## kpedersen (Nov 10, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> but it is usually correlated with good, since bad things tend to get washed away. How many people still use PrimOS or Banyan Vines?



Kind of reminds me of the Lindy effect. The reason why something like C or UNIX has such a good future lifespan is projected from the fact that they are already very old.

(Doesn't work on "living things" I'm afraid. We are doomed for failure! )


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## grahamperrin@ (Dec 17, 2021)

mhakan said:


> When will FreeBSD 14 be officially released?





grahamperrin said:


> 14.0-RELEASE some time in 2023, I guess.


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## Crivens (Dec 17, 2021)

Jose said:


> The other one I'm curious about to this day is BeOS. I happened to work in the same office that was BeOS's headquarters years ago. I felt unworthy.


Try Haiku.
I once had a business pizza dinner with Gasee (bad spelling, I know). Boy they were nuts...


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