FreeBSD-7.1, BETA2 or PRERELEASE

[Josh Paetzel]

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Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 03:07:32PM +0530, Masoom Shaikh wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> y'day I csuped the src and built installed the kernel from RELENG_7
>> I was expecting FreeBSD-BETA2 in output of `uname -a`
>> it is still -PRERELEASE, is it by decision or I have to change something ?
>>
>> I greped /usr/src for PRERELEASE but cud not locate it. I guess release
>> engineering team does that. comments ?
> 
> This question keeps coming up.
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2008-October/184992.html
> 
> RELENG_7 == PRERELEASE.  There is no "BETA2" tag to follow.
> 
> No one is sure at this point where the "BETA2" string has come from
> (meaning why it was idealised or why it's being used).  I'm of the
> belief that it's something Ken is hand-hacking in newvers.sh before
> building + making ISO releases and putting them up on the mirrors.
> And I am also of the opinion that this should stop, and we should simply
> name the releases PRERELEASE-YYYYMMDD to signify the build date.
> 

When you run make release you have to set BUILDNAME to something.  That
value then sets the value of RELEASE in sys/conf/newvers.sh, which then
affects uname output.

I suppose everyone has an opinion as to what to name things, a classic
bikeshed item.  My opinion is that if BETA2 is an arbitrary name and
there's no way to know the timestamp it was built from in CVS, then
replacing BETA2 with the timestamp used for the CVS checkout makes
sense.  Of course CVS is good down to the second, so it would have to be
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS...and at that point 7.1-PRERELEASE-20081020071001 starts
making BETA2 look good.

- --
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel

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