A little bit of help understanding CVS and cvsup

Andrew Falanga af300wsm at gmail.com
Thu May 17 18:32:01 UTC 2007


On 5/17/07, Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52 at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> Andrew Falanga wrote:
>
> You can find a description of release tags in the handbook.
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html
> and also a description of -STABLE and -CURRENT
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html.
>
> Later bits in that section also describe the update procedure *even if
> you are updating to a RELEASE./RELENG rather then CURRENT or STABLE*.
>
> A brief description of the strings in tags is a follows:
>
> CURRENT == bleeding edge
>
> STABLE == merely leading edge
>
> RELENG == what you are calling "stable"; a release plus security patches
> only
>
> RELEASE == sort of you are calling stable, exactly what was released
> (not recommended since it lacks any security patches)
>
> The latest release is 6.2, so the tag you want in your supfile is
> RELENG_6_2.  That string won't be in any supfile on your system.  It's
> impossible for it to be, since that would require predicting what will
> be the latest release at the point in the future when you chose to
> upgrade :-)
>
> In technical terms, CURRENT is the top of the main development trunk,
> and is often referred to with a leading number (e.g. 7-CURRENT), but the
> number does no more than denote the numeric tag that will be applied
> when the next branch is made.  Once 7.0 starts being created, CURRENT
> will be 8-CURRENT.
>
> STABLE is the latest branch.  Code here will become the next Release.
> Moving code from CURRENT to STABLE, involves a CVS merge operation and
> is often referred to as MFC - merge from CURRENT.
>
> RELENG is a branch created when a specific release is made.  It denotes
> the latest code on that branch, but the only changes made will be
> critical security fixes.
>
> RELEASE is just the point on the RELENG branch which is the actual code
> which was released on the Release CDs.
>
> --Alex
>
> PS
>
> Be really nice if all this info was clearly in the FAQ, and the FAQ was
> searchable apart from the whole website.  As things stand, a search for
> "stable" returns precisely nothing, which can't be right.
>
>
>
>
Thank you for the detailed description.  Just one last question for
you and the list, what sort of heart ache can I expect to encounter if
I use the label RELEASE_6_2 in my supfile on a system that is 6.0?  I
need to upgrade a 6.0-RELEASE (no patches) system.  Will I encounter
compiler problems (that is, I'm using a compiler that's older than I
should for 6.2), or similar?  Or, should the upgrade be just as smooth
as the run through I just completed on a non-critical notebook running
6.2-RELEASE (or rather, it was running 6.2-RELEASE, now it's
6.2-RELEASE-p4)?

Thanks again,
Andy


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list