Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 11:52:38 -0500 From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> To: Alex Zhang <alex34live@gmail.com> Cc: Questions <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Question: the stable edition of Freebsd Message-ID: <20081103165237.GC30359@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <FC85C61A1AD74640B71DCDEC505755D8@inb> References: <FC85C61A1AD74640B71DCDEC505755D8@inb>
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On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:01:21PM +0800, Alex Zhang wrote: > Dear Support: > > I'm a newcomer and want to install FreeBSD for study. Could you pls let me > know which the stable edition of FreeBSD now? > > And let me know how to subscribe the Q&A list that I prefer. > > Thanks in advance. > All of this is well documented on the FreeBSD website (www.freebsd.org) For informatino on the mailing lists, go to: http://www.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html or http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo and look around. The version setup in FreeBSD can be a little confusing for newcomers because the terms stable and current are used in very specific ways - formally defined rather than in the more loose general conversation way we often use them. Current is the bleeding edge of development work - nothing is guaranteed and stable is the development branch that is actually intended to eventually become the next new version -- rather than current being the official present version out or stable being the most reliable version as one might guess from just the words before studying the documentation.. Check this part of the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html If you are a FreeBSD beginning, what you want is a RELEASE version. The latest at the moment are 6.3 and 7.0 In the present form of the web page, the latest RELEASEs plus the next two are listed right there on the first page. Other information on upcoming releases can be found on the Release Engineering page: http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html By the way, "releng" stands for Release Engineering here and when you track a version for security updates you track a RELENG version. So, if you installed FreeBSD 7.1, then in your csupfile you would put: *default tag=RELENG_7_1 That would get you the security updates for FreeBSD 7.1 If you wanted to jump up to stable you would put: *default tag=RELENG_7 and that would be the stable version of the FreeBSD 7 branch. But, the funny thing about it is that the STABLE line is not mean that it is actually stable. They try to assure that it compiles and builds. And, usually it is pretty good. But it hasn't gone through all the official builds and been run against all the known problem sets as has a RELEASE when it is 'released'. So, for now, just install a RELEASE - probably 7.1 if you can wait or 7.0 right now and track the security fixes by csup-ing to RELENG_7_1 or RELENG_7_0 Have fun, ////jerry ////jerry > > > BR > > Alex > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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