FreeBSD 2.1-960627-SNAP (2.1.5 BETA) is released.

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

See ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.1-960627-SNAP for the usual
bits.

Your prompt feedback on this release will be most appreciated as we'd
like to get 2.1.5-RELEASE out sometime in the next 10 days.  I do
realize that this is a rather short BETA cycle, but the extended
testing that the 2.1-stable branch (from which 2.1.5 is derived) has
undergone would make further delay somewhat superfluous.  We do not
expect any significant problems with this release.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to address some confusion that
people have had regarding the 2.1 SNAPs vs the 2.2 SNAPs.

Back when FreeBSD 2.0.5 was released, we branched FreeBSD development
into two parts: One branch was named -stable, with the intention that
only well-tested bug fixes and small incremental enhancements would be
made to it (for ISPs and other commercial enterprises for whom sudden
shifts or experimental features are quite undesirable).  The other
branch was -current, which essentially has been one unbroken line
since 2.0 was released.  If a little ASCII art would help, this is how
it looks:

                       2.0
                        |
                        |
                        |
                      2.0.5 --- > 2.1 ---> 2.1.5   [-stable]
                        |
                        |
          [-current]   2.2-SNAPs
                        |
                        |
                       2.2 (scheduled for Q4 '96)
                        |
                        |
                        .
                        .
                        future releases (2.3, 3.0, etc)

The -current branch is slowly progressing towards 2.2 and beyond,
whereas the -stable branch will effectively end with 2.1.5.

While we'd certainly like to be able to continue both branches of
development, we've found that CVS is a very poor tool for mantaining
multiple longer-term branches like this and quickly results in a
maintainance nightmare for any branch which lives much beyond 2-3
months.  The -stable branch has, by contrast, lasted for well over a
year and what little sanity the FreeBSD developers have left would be
in serious jeopardy if we continued in this way.  Perhaps in the
future we'll figure out another model which gives everyone what they
want, and we are working on such a model, but in the meantime it's
probably best to think of -stable coming to an end with 2.1.5-RELEASE.

We recommend this upcoming 2.1.5 release over the 2.2-SNAPshot
releases to anyone for whom stability and dependability are of
paramount importance.  This is not to say that the 2.2 lineage is
inherently instable, and there are many hundreds (if not thousands) of
people happily running it today, it's simply that our focus with 2.1.5
has been very different and many of the new features in 2.2 aren't
quite ready for prime-time yet, nor will they be until later this
summer.

As always, general comments should be sent to hackers at freebsd.org and
questions to the questions at freebsd.org mailing list.

Thanks!

					Jordan