From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Mar 25 10:19:50 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 777C137B718 for ; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 10:19:45 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 73202 invoked by uid 100); 25 Mar 2001 18:19:44 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15038.14016.76133.662835@guru.mired.org> Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 12:19:44 -0600 To: "Doug Young" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 4.3 FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <68957588@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.89 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Doug Young types: > > I think you have to read the mailing lists and decide if you need > > to go to -STABLE. > Probably the correct attitude ..... the more I read about problems > resulting from CVSUP the more I think its better for people wanting > a really reliable & relatively basic system to stick with RELEASE > versions, although as you say the later point versions may well be > better than earlier ones. Well, the longest uptimes are obtained by having installed 2.2.8 and left the machine alone ever since :-). Yeah - for productions machines that I'm not monitering regularly, I install -RELEASE, and update (either to -stable, or with patches) when there's a security problem in something the machine is running. I've only rarely encountered a system that wasn't able to go between -RELEASE's without crashing. I also avoid .0 releases for the really critical machines in that category, as that's the first exposure of that branch to the public. This latter rule applies to commercial, non-Unix software as well. Though I haven't noticed this on FreeBSD, for commercial software the .1 releases seem to be mostly bug fixes, and it's not until .2 that performance of the new features is comparable to what they replaced. On the other hand, these days marketeers seem to be driving release names/numbers, so these guidelines are no longer useful for commercial software. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message