[H-GEN] FreeBSD CVS Tree Confusion.

James Lever jamver at adams.humbug.org.au
Sun Jun 8 00:24:15 EDT 2003


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Hi Gerbil,

According to Gerbil at bigpond.net.au (on Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 02:01:59PM +1000):
> Quick question re. FreeBSD tree's:
> 
> I understand that CURRENT is HEAD in Cvsup and is the 'cutting edge'
> fixes/updates(most of which dont work together yet), but as far as I can
> find in the Handbook there's only one STABLE, which is RELENG_4, and the
> release branches for 5.0 and 5.1 only contain advisories and other critical
> fixes? So the only conclusion I could draw is that STABLE is based on
> FreeBSD 4, when they have released TWO distributions since then??? Why not
> have stable for version 5.1 that contains tested updates since the 5.1
> release.  Probably I have it all wrong, because at the moment i'm really
> confused by this, I have pasted the relevant section that i'm refferring to
> from the FreeBSD Handbook, can someone please try and explain this to me?

The answer to your question lies in the FreeBSD early adopter guide as 
referred to in all current FreeBSD releases.

  http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/early-adopter.html

The introduction of this document reads as follows:

--
1 Introduction

FreeBSD 5.0 marks the first new major version of FreeBSD in over two
years. Besides a number of new features, it also contains a number of
major developments in the underlying system architecture. Along with
these advances, however, comes a system that incorporates a tremendous
amount of new and not-widely-tested code. Compared to the existing line
of 4.X releases, 5.0 may have regressions in areas of stability,
performance, and occasionally functionality.

For these reasons, the Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org> does
not encourage users to blindly update from older FreeBSD releases to
5.0. Specifically, for more conservative users, we recommend running
4.X releases (such as 4.7-RELEASE or the upcoming 4.8-RELEASE) for the
near-term future. We feel that such users are probably best served by
upgrading to 5.X only after a 5-STABLE development branch has been
created; this may be around the time of 5.1-RELEASE or 5.2-RELEASE.

(FreeBSD 5.0 suffers from what has been described as a ``chicken and
egg'' problem. The entire project has a goal of producing a 5.0-RELEASE
that is as stable and reliable as possible. This stability and reliability
requires widespread testing, particularly of the system's newer features.
However, getting a large number of users to test the system, in a
practical sense, means building and distributing a release first!)

This article describes some of the issues involved in installing and
running FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. We begin with a brief overview of the
FreeBSD release process. We then present some of the more noteworthy
new features in FreeBSD 5.0, along with some areas that may prove
troublesome for unwary users. For those users choosing to remain with
4-STABLE-based releases, we give some of the short- to medium-term plans
for this development branch. Finally, we present some notes on upgrading
existing 4.X systems to 5.0.
--

cheers,
James


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