Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 12:51:46 -0700 From: Joshua Tinnin <krinklyfig@spymac.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Your 3rd and last chance to help me with vmware Message-ID: <200407211251.46229.krinklyfig@spymac.com> In-Reply-To: <8BD99AA9-DB4C-11D8-BD53-003065ABFD92@mac.com> References: <4B3F673172B98D449EBCC3BE8316F524041F765A@exch4.elcsb.net> <200407211134.44903.krinklyfig@spymac.com> <8BD99AA9-DB4C-11D8-BD53-003065ABFD92@mac.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wednesday 21 July 2004 12:31 pm, Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> wrote: > On Jul 21, 2004, at 2:34 PM, Joshua Tinnin wrote: > > Then why do I hear that 5.2.1-RELEASE is not ready to be called STABLE? > > FreeBSD's -CURRENT tree has generally been reasonably stable, but there > have been periods (including quite recently with threading/#define > PREEMPTION) where -CURRENT has not been reliable enough to qualify as > -STABLE. > > > Why would it be downgraded? Why have there been no STABLE 5.x > > branches? Or am I > > just confused? > > There have been no 5.x branches which qualify as -STABLE, correct. > > You may be confused, but it is the result of the extent of changes to > 5.x taking longer to settle down than the developers would want. The > hope was that 5.1 or 5.2 would be stable enough to promote 5.x to > -STABLE perhaps six months ago. This hasn't happened, and is the > reason why there is a big push to get 5.3 stabilized and solid. > > Again, there is some leeway for a .0 release, such as 5.0, to not be as > stable as the earlier 4.x releases, but the extended period where 5.1 > and 5.2 were put out as RELEASES while 4.x remains -STABLE has not been > helpful to users trying to determine what the best release for them to > run should be. OK, as I understand, the branches are -CURRENT and -STABLE. But I often see 4.10-STABLE recommended for production use. This is probably due to what you describe above. What does RELEASE mean, as specifically as you can? I'm using 5.2.1-RELEASE and am not planning on going 4.10-STABLE, as I can't due to hardware, and it's not a big deal as this isn't for production. But I'm curious ... is RELEASE supposed to be the *most* preferable candidate for someone considering a production OS, but just at this time, 5.x hasn't settled down? If it had settled down, would would the most preferable production snapshot in 5.x-STABLE be called RELEASE? And is this not the case now because 5.x is taking longer than it should, so RELEASE is there, even if perhaps it shouldn't be? Ack! Now I'm confusing myself ... - jt
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200407211251.46229.krinklyfig>