Desktop usability ideas.

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Sat Sep 17 18:54:39 PDT 2005


On 2005-09-17 21:41, WOB <wayofbsd at verizon.net> wrote:
> I think part of my solution is to encourage other newbies to track a
> release instead of stable. So we would follow "5_4" instead of "5",
> since "5" is on its way to become "5_5" - and might have some bugs with
> the features that are being added.
>
> I read about this here:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html

It's great that you have found this page by yourself.  I was about to
post a reply pointing to that webpage, but now you know where it is :)

Having said that, I think that I also need to point out that there exist
at least the following types of FreeBSD 'versions'[1]:

	- The "release" versions that are, as you know now, frozen in
	  time snapshots of the source.  These never change *after* the
	  release date, which is good if you want to know exactly what
	  features or bugs are there, but also a bit bad because no bugs
	  get fixed in the "release" version of the source tree.

	  These snapshots are tagged with a label like:

		RELENG_5_4_0_RELEASE

	  The label does *NOT* move to different versions of the source
	  files after the release is cut.

	- The "security branches" are offshoots of the "release" version,
	  created when security fixes are made to a release.  These may change
	  as security problems are found hat affect the source of the release.
	  Their names are of the form:

		RELENG_X_Y

	- The "stable" branch, is a separate branch of development that is
	  kept "stable" by committing only a controlled number of features and
	  bug fixes.  This is named:

		RELENG_X

	- The "development" branch (sometimes called "HEAD", from the special
	  CVS branch that matches this version of every file, or "CURRENT" in
	  FreeBSD circles).  New features are constantly being added here, the
	  source tree changes very often and may be rather unstable (even to
	  the point of crashing your systems or damaging useful, important
	  data) at times.

Which one of the above matches your taste is largely a personal matter :)

[1] The term 'versions' here refers to slightly different source trees,
not to version numbers like 4.10, 4.11 or 5.4.



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