From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Mar 19 10:24:15 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id F354E1518B for ; Fri, 19 Mar 1999 10:24:00 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 9380 invoked by uid 100); 19 Mar 1999 18:23:41 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 19 Mar 1999 18:23:41 -0000 Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 10:23:41 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Confusion In-Reply-To: <19990319094651.A75415@relay.nuxi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ok, I've watched this for a while. I've got to say something. From: David O'Brien > This guy is absolutely correct. The designations RELEASE, STABLE, > and CURRENT, what they mean, and the targeted audience of each are > exceedingly confusing. STABLE is the only one that is. CURRENT isn't - it's the current build, possibly working, possibly not. That STABLE applies to the source tree, not the resulting product, is confusing. RELEASE is just that - a released product. From what I can tell, the complaint about 3.0 was that it was labelled as release when it wasn't as stable as the existing (2.2.x) product. However, the *only* way to get it to that level of stability was to get people using it on a much more widespread basis than it was being used as -CURRENT. That's true for *any* product that includes lots of new technology. That's why .0 releases are generally so buggy/slow/etc - they haven't been debugged in nearly as broad a range of environments as the .1, .2, etc. releases. I'm relatively new to FreeBSD - this was my first .0 release with it, and it appeared to be pretty bad. I was lucky in that my system was built for 3.0, and my second system I could delay until 3.1. On the other hand, I've been working with Unix for > 20 years now, and I've seen worse .0 releases from commercial vendors, and seldom seen better ones from non-commercial projects. If you want to fault the FreeBSD team for debugging on their customers platforms - then you've got to fault the entire industry. Everyone does it - because there isn't any way you can replicate *every* system that users are going to try and run your product on. Wise users have been avoiding .0 releases for production systems since - well, longer than I've been in the game. It's part of life in the software world, at least until that world undergoes some *radical* changes. In short, you're faulting the FreeBSD team for doing what everyone does. The difference is they were honest about it, and got out a .1 release in quick-time to get the bug fixes in place.