Tracking FreeBSD-CURRENT

[Stefan Esser]

Am 03.09.20 um 09:14 schrieb Dmitry Salychev via freebsd-hackers:
> Dear FreeBSD Hackers,
> 
> I'm looking for an advice about tracking development branch on my laptop.
> 
> There're several steps described in details at [1] which make it clear
> what to do, but I'm trying to understand do I really need to track
> FreeBSD-CURRENT to develop a driver, for instance, if I want to keep my
> current laptop running r354233 patched locally.

Any new code must be committed to -CURRENT first, before it may be
merged into the stable branches (and then will make it into a release).

While working with an up-to-date -CURRENT is best, you may keep it at
some revision for a few weeks or even months during your development,
but may have to rebase it to the then latest -CURRENT revision before
the final commit.

Since -CURRENT makes no guarantees with regard to kernel interfaces
and data structures, there is a small risk, that you'll have to adopt
to changes between when you "froze" your -CURRENT source tree and the
tree at the time of commit.

Staying current is not much of a problem, though. On my system, the
"svn up" of the -CURRENT source tree generally finishes in less than
10 seconds and "make buildworld" takes only a few minutes, if you
enable META_MODE - and if there are any collisions you'll notice
them just when the conflicting changes are fresh and it is easy to
assess what needs to be done to adapt your code.

> I believe that I'm not the first person in this situation and there might
> be existing solutions I'm not aware of.

Definitely not, and I know that some developers fork -CURRENT at
some suitable point and merge from the official repository only every
few weeks.

This will obviously not be a good approach, if you are working with
data structures that are in the process of being significantly modified,
e.g. to improve the scale-ability of the filesystem or network code.

Regards, STefan
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 495 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20200903/19cfe8b2/attachment.sig>