Whence RC4?

[Shane Ambler]

On 01/11/2014 01:31, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
> I've been watching the update servers eagerly since the day RC4 was to begin
> building, based on the schedule here:
>
>      https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/schedule.html
>
> And yet, http://update.freebsd.org/10.1-RC4/ continues not to exist.

10.1-RC4 exists in svn -
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=273874

It can take a few days before all the binaries are compiled to be ready
for release - all arches and ports that are included in iso's need to
finish compiling, at which stage iso images will exist on ftp sites
and an email will announce the release. A weekend can extend that wait.

> I haven't found a public releng coordination mailing list or any real
> explanation of the process. Can someone enlighten me? The article
>
>      https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/article.html
>
> talks about binary patchkits existing to match releng/x.y branches, but it
> doesn't describe their creation or how such a process might differ for
> release candidates.

I think this would be explained in -
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-update-server/index.html

> While I'm interested in this, I've also got the secondary goal of exploring
> how to move back to using binary patches and freebsd-update after having
> built from source for a while. My home desktop is my test case, and it's
> currently identifying itself as being 10.1-RC3, built from this at the right
> time:
>
>      https://svn0.us-east.freebsd.org/base/releng/10.1

see 'man freebsd-update' - the upgrade command is used to change
release versions - RC to release needs an upgrade not just an update

> Something I'm not clear on is the possibility of finding a particular point
> in time along a branch with Subversion, be it a tag or a date. I still think
> in terms of CVS and that seems not to be valid when applied to SVN. It seems
> like Subversion has 'svn up -r' to update to a particular revision number, or
> a rough date specifier to update to "revision at start of the date".
>
> How does FreeBSD deal with the lack of CVS-style tags? If one wanted to
> recreate a 10.1-RC2 build, for instance, is there a sane way to do it, or
> would it involve grovelling through commit logs for clues?

Not sure what is officially used - sys/conf/newvers.sh is most likely
the file to look at, it's commit log is mostly RC/Beta tags.

-- 
FreeBSD - the place to B...Scaring Daemons

Shane Ambler