Main differences between RELEASE_X and RELEASE_X_Y branches

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Monday 06 December 2004 01:18 pm, ptitoliv 
<ptitoliv at frenchsuballiance.cjb.net> wrote:
> >No, except that RELEASEs eventually are dropped from being officially
> >supported. 3.x is no longer supported. Chances are 3.x is not very 
secure,
> >due to new threats which haven't been patched to it since it was 
dropped,
> > but 4.x is good for a while even though 5.3 is the new RELEASE.
>
> Hi again everybody,
>
> First, I want to thank you all the mailing list memebrs who have
> answered to my questions. The BSD Tree is more explicit for me now :)
> But I have a little last question :-). I am now in FreeBSD 4.9
> RELEASE-p11 and I would want to now if it is necessary to upgrade it 
to
> 4.10 because 4.9 is no longer supported anf if it is safe ?

In general it's a good idea to upgrade when your RELEASE version is 
dropped from support, but it depends on how you're using the machine, 
what specific vulnerabilities are addressed in newer RELEASEs, and 
whether or not you actually need what's provided by upgrading. Some 
people are still happily (and sometimes relatively securely) running 
4.9, while many others have upgraded. As far as the specific 
differences between 4.9 and 4.10, I'm honestly not sure (have only used 
5.x myself), but you could check out the archives of the -questions 
list to see what people were encountering while doing such an upgrade: 
http://www.freebsd.org/search/search.html#mailinglists  Also, when you 
cvsup the source for 4.10, check out /usr/src/UPDATING

- jt