FreeBSD-7.1, BETA2 or PRERELEASE

[Masoom Shaikh]

thanks to all those gr8 comments, I learnt.

and sorry for creating noise, I was in office and thus could not put
required effort.

as far as liking of release names goes, I feel BETA-x naming practice serves
the purpose, it makes sense to casual users. changing version with date is
too fast....just my two cents if they count ;-)

Aston

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:45 PM, mdh <mdh_lists at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- On Fri, 10/24/08, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > From: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org>
> > Subject: Re: FreeBSD-7.1, BETA2 or PRERELEASE
> > To: "Masoom Shaikh" <masoom.shaikh at gmail.com>
> > Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> > Date: Friday, October 24, 2008, 6:26 AM
> > 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.
>
> It seems likely.  I've only ever seen -PRERELEASE and -STABLE, when
> tracking "RELENG_[0-9]" branch.  On the other hand, I have seen -RELEASE,
> -BETA, -RC, etc, when installing from media.
>
> Perhaps differentiating these isn't a bad idea, however, when it comes to
> uname output in PR's, despite the queries it generates over here.  A media
> install can always be safely assumed to be a given set of code, while if
> someone is tracking a branch via cvsup, the build time would show up in
> uname output, however the user may still need to be queried for rcsid's or
> asked to cvsup to the latest if the issue is considered to possibly be a
> base system and/or kernel code issue.
>
> It's probably worth discussion and consideration, though.  I don't know
> if/how useful the utility of the current naming conventions are to folks
> trying to solve potential code bug PRs.
>
> - mdh
>
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