Production readiness and upgrading from FreeBSD 4.11

[Jeff Duffy]

Greetings all,

 While I'm sure it's a familiar story, my company has relied on FreeBSD 
for quite a long time, and we have a large number of servers  running 
FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE-p3. The direction the 5.x branch has taken doesn't 
suit us, so DragonFly is the likely upgrade path. I have read all the 
documentation I can find on the site, and I'd like to ask for some help 
with the following questions:

1. The most important question is when will the DragonFly team consider 
the OS 'production quality'? This may be now, but I've read Matt 
Dillon's various quotes and interviews with interest, and he's said on 
a few occasions that companies may want to wait a bit before 
converting. We're feeling the end of support for the 4.x tree closing 
in, and we need to make a decision soon about what to do about it.

2. The "Upgrading from FreeBSD 4" document references 4.9 as the most 
recent version. Obviously quite a few things have changed in the 
meantime, so is 'make upgrade' still a viable upgrade path? That 
DragonFly has made easy upgrades from FreeBSD 4.x a priority warms my 
heart :)

3. We run jdk-1.4.2p6_7 compiled from ports. Is there any reason to 
think this won't easily transfer to DragonFly? We have created our own 
package, and rely heavily for the near future on Java and Tomcat until 
our Python port is complete.

Obviously we'll be running internal tests, but if there's anything it 
would help to know I'd appreciate it.

 Thanks for your help.

Jeff Duffy