Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Colin Percival]

Danny Howard wrote:
> So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus
> improvements, why isn't it called 5.5?

FreeBSD numbers releases based on compatibility, not based on
features. You can take programs compiled for FreeBSD 5.3 (the
first release from the 5-stable branch) and run them on FreeBSD
5.4 and know that they will all work; but if you want to run
them on FreeBSD 6.0, you might need to recompile them.

This is generally more of an issue for kernel modules than it
is for applications, but the point remains: If binary interfaces
change, the major number should change.

Colin Percival