freebsd naming of releases

[Julian H. Stacey]

HEADS UP
Below is a repeat posting dated Wed, 30 Mar 2005.  I'm not convinced
Chuck re-posted it, as I think I've read it before.  I've forwarded
to postmasters to investigate.  The thread was debated to termination
back then, & deosn't need revival now.  It might be a troll trying
to blow air on embers, or it might be a bad config somewhere, but
hopefully all except investigating postmasters, (particularly
@mu.org) can ignore it.  Thanks
-- 
Julian Stacey    Muenchner Unix Urlaubs Vertretungs Dienst   http://berklix.com
 Mail in Ascii (Html = Spam).  Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.

--------
Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> > Charles Swiger wrote:
> >>>I find that the terms "alpha", "beta" and "production" do not quite 
> >>>fit the FreeBSD development paradigm. (Is RELENG_5 beta or 
> >>>production?)
> >>
> >>It's beta.  -CURRENT (or RELENG_6) is alpha, and production is now at
> > 
> > 
> > Wrong: Current != Alpha.
> >   Industry common parlance of "Alpha Release" is per se a sort of (pre) release.
> >   FreeBSD Current is continuously moving & not a release;  eg cvs -r HEAD 
> 
> I know that HEAD is continuously moving.  Saying code is "in alpha" does not 
> imply that it is ready for release or being put through a release cycle.
> 
> I suppose that someone comfortable with the term "alpha release" would also be 
> happy with the notion of "paid beta releases": software made publicly 
> available to all customers (which is my definition of "going into production", 
> or perhaps "going into production but trying to avoid providing real support 
> even if people have paid for the software" is closer :-).
> 
> > Perhaps you equated Alpha & Current because that's the first one
> > has access to from commercial companies & FreeBSD respectively, but
> > that doesnt make them the same thing.  Binaries from a commercial
> > company's current one wouldn't normally see (let alone the source :-).
> 
> No, my definition of alpha means "code that works well enough to implement at 
> least some major features, but may be missing other features and is expected 
> to contain significant bugs which make it unwise to depend on the system for 
> production use".  Windows jokes aside, commercial companies don't normally 
> release alpha code to the outside world.
> 
> Beta means "code that is basicly feature-complete modulo bugs, is ready for 
> outside testing, but still contains significant bugs and is not guaranteed to 
> be stable for production" (as in, "beta code is not supported").
> 
> In FreeBSD, one critereon for whether a release is in production, is whether a 
> security advisory results in that branch being updated.  The recent release of 
>   FreeBSD-SA-05:01.telnet resulted in RELENG_5_3, RELENG_4_11, and RELENG_4_10 
> being updated as well as HEAD, RELENG_5, & RELENG_4.  (Maybe 4.8, too.)
> 
> -- 
> -Chuck
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> 
> 
> 

-- 
Julian Stacey     Consultant Systems Engineer, Munich.     http://berklix.com
Mail in Ascii (Html = Spam).  Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.