Release engineering process confusions and "make (build)world"

[cco1817-0 at yahoo.de]

Hi folks,

Up to now, when I'm installing my FreeBSD boxes I download the latest RELEASE iso-image for my platform. These days I used 7.0-RELEASE. For security fixes I use the provided patches as mentioned in the security advisories. 

Since a long time I'm asking myself the following questions and I don't find answers in the handbook (e.g. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/article.html) or other ressources:

1. Some SA's say that the a bug is corrected in a particular RELENG or RELEASE or a patched RELEASE. For example FreeBSD-SA-08:05.openssh states that >>RELENG_7_0, 7.0-RELEASE-p1<<. But where can I get a -p1??? I've never seen iso-images for a x.y-RELEASE-pnn. Is this the time where I need to build a release (as iso-image) by myself? If so, what branch-tag do I need to get 7.0-RELEASE-p1?

2. I understood that there are two different development branches, >>HEAD aka CURRENT<< and >>STABLE<<. I avoid using these branches because I'm not a developer. Thats the reason why I only want to use RELEASES. But what the hell is a "RELENG"??? Why are these things not called 7.0-CURRENT or 7.0-STABLE and so on (and 7.0-RELEASE for me)? Maybe I've a problem to understand this because I'm not really familar with CVSup.

3. I played around with jails these days and I had my first contact with "make world". Despite the inconsistencies in the handbook where the jail-chapter instructs to use "make world" and the rebuilding world part warns explicitly and proposes "make buildworld" (but the Makefile tells me that the target >>world<< stands for "buildworld + installworld, no kernel" which seems okay?!), does it make sense to use "make buildworld" also when I'm not updating to another RELEASE? As it compiles everything on my machine (it autodetects my CPU and features?!) I guess the system should perform better?! Is it possible or common to update to the latest source tree (where latest means I want to stay at the current RELEASE but want to have all patches like 7.0-RELEASE-p1)? Or results an updating process of the source tree always in a switch to STABLE or CURRENT (depending on the branch tag in CVSup config?)?

Many thanks in advance to everyone who puts me in the right direction. Before posting to the list I read some documents (mainly the handbook), but maybe I missed some small but important sentences. Thanks!

cheers,
Ede


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