OK - I'm stumped - where IS stable? Sorry if it seems like a dumb question but I looked in the handbook...

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: "Mitch \(Bitblock\)" <mitch at bitblock.com>
> Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2006 16:15:57 -0800
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> The handbook
> (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.ht
> ml#STABLE) references ftp://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/
> - which doesn't seem to contain any 6.0 files newer than 2004?
> 
> The main FTP site doesn't contain a "branches" folder for anything past
> 4.0-stable.
> 
> Are formal "stable releases" not available for 6.0 yet? Just the current
> daily snapshots?

Formal "stable releases" are called releases. Stable is the development
branch of a given version. At this time there are "stable" branches of
at least versions 3, 4, 5, and 6. But these are branches and normally
the most recent point on any branch is referred to as "stable". Releases
are (more or less) marked points along the stable development that get a
great deal of extra work to make them as clean as possible and then the
tree is tagged with the release and ISO images are generated for the
various platforms. If you want a "stable release", you want just that, a
release.

As of this time there has been only a single release on the version 6
branch, 6.0. If you want 6, install 6.0-Release. From there you can
update your system to 6-Stable, if you wish. (The same is true for prior
version, except that V3 is pretty much dead these days and 4 gets little
attention other than security issues. V5 is moving in that direction,
but is still getting some updates.

Snapshots are built, but not on the normal distribution systems. They
are on ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/, but they are not
"formal" in any way. They are development snapshots and nothing more.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634