Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:17:56 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: wwoods@cybcon.com, "freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: 3.0 Snap---- Message-ID: <19980727111756.P716@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980726123900.wwoods@cybcon.com>; from William Woods on Sun, Jul 26, 1998 at 12:39:00PM -0700 References: <XFMail.980726123900.wwoods@cybcon.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday, 26 July 1998 at 12:39:00 -0700, William Woods wrote: > I dont know if this is the right list, but.............Would you all (those of > you who are running it) consider 3.0 useable and stable to use in a work > enviroment? I know it is beta but I just had to ask.... Here's the text from "The Complete FreeBSD", second edition (http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/bsdbook2.htm). Decide for yourself, but don't come crying if it breaks on you. FreeBSD-CURRENT is the very latest version of FreeBSD, still under development. All new development work is done on this branch of the tree. FreeBSD-CURRENT is an ever-changing snapshot of the working sources for FreeBSD, including work in progress, experimental changes and transitional mechanisms that may or may not be present in the next official release of the software. Many users compile almost daily from FreeBSD-CURRENT sources, but there times when the sources are uncompilable. The problems are always resolved, but others can take their place. On occasion, keeping up with FreeBSD-CURRENT can be a full- time business. If you use -CURRENT, you should be prepared to spend a lot of time keeping the system running. The following extract from the RCS log file for /usr/src/Makefile should give you a feel for the situation: revision 1.152 Hooboy! Did I ever spam this file good with that last commit. Despite 3 reviewers, we still managed to revoke the eBones fixes, TCL 8.0 support, libvgl and a host of other new things from this file in the process of parallelizing the Makefile. DOH! I think we need more pointy hats - this particular incident is worthy of a small children's birthday party's worth of pointy hats. ;-) I certainly intend to take more care with the processing of aged diffs in the future, even if it does mean reading through 20K's worth of them. I might also be a bit more careful about asking for more up-to-date changes before looking at them. ;) So why use -CURRENT? The main reasons are: o You yourself might be working on some part of the source tree. Keeping ``current'' is an absolute requirement. o You may be an active tester, which imples that you're willing to spend time working through problems in order to ensure that FreeBSD-CURRENT remains as sane as possible. You may also wish to make topical suggestions on changes and the general direction of FreeBSD. o You may just want to keep an eye on things and use the current sources for reference purposes. People occasionally have other reasons for wanting to use FreeBSD-CURRENT. The following are not good reasons: o They see it as a way to be the first on the block with great new FreeBSD features. This is not a good reason, because there's no reason to believe that the features will stay, and there is good reason to believe that they will be unstable. o They see it as a quick way of getting bug fixes. In fact, it's a way of testing bug fixes. Bug fixes will be retrofitted into the -STABLE branch as soon as they have been properly tested. o They see it as the newest officially supported release of FreeBSD. This is incorrect: FreeBSD-CURRENT is not officially supported. The support is provided by the users. -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980727111756.P716>