11.1 ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta and RC builds

[Ernie Luzar]

Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 15/06/2017 21:17, Ernie Luzar wrote:
>> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/schedule.html
>>
>> Shows no alpha builds. Is it normal to start the release build process
>> with beta builds skipping the alpha builds?
>>
>> I see ISO-IMAGES for 11.1 beta1. I don't remembering seeing ISO-IMAGES
>> for previous alpha, beta and RC build releases. Is this a new change to
>> existing procedures?  Are we going to see ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta and
>> RC builds from now on?
>>
>> Where does snapshot prerelease fit into the alpha, beta and RC build
>> process?
>>
>> Is this documented someplace?
> 
> The alpha builds are internal to Release Engineering -- they're
> essentially just a sanity check that the code to go into the release
> doesn't have obvious problems.  The beta builds are the first ones
> released to the public for wider testing, once RE is satisfied that they
> won't cause your machine to spit chunks of harddrive all over the floor
> or other faux-pas.
> 
> Yes, pre-release iso images have been released historically for people
> to download and do test installs.  It's pretty hard to get people to
> test releases in any case, so making it as convenient as possible for
> people to install is a good idea.
> 
> The 'snapshot' referred to in the release schedule is a tag created in
> the code repository so that the precise BETA1 or BETA2 or whatever code
> can be checked out in a repeatable way.  The BETAs are built against the
> 11-STABLE branch in SVN, which is the main and fairly active development
> branch for all 11.x code.  So the BETAs could evolve quite rapidly,
> although we're in a code-freeze at the moment and all commits to
> 11-STABLE require RE approval.
> 
> Once the BETAs have proven satisfactory, the 11.1-RELEASE branch will be
> created.  This means two things: first, and commits to 11-STABLE after
> the branch point will not appear in 11.1-RELEASE unless specifically
> merged (so the RE lock on commit approvals to 11-STABLE will be lifted).
>  Second: the release branch is effectively in feature-freeze at this
> point and only fixes for issues discovered during testing will be applied.
> 
> This is basically the same process that has been used since around
> 6.0-RELEASE.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
> 
> 

Thank you for the details. Let me reword this to be sure I understand 
what you said.

All BETA, RC, and RELEASE builds have ISO-IMAGES created, and the result 
in the "uname -r" command will contain BETA, RC, or RELEASE as part of 
the OS name.

Snapshots for alpha, PRERELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT builds do not have 
ISO-IMAGES created and the result of the "uname -r" command will contain 
PRERELEASE, STABLE or CURRENT as part of the OS name.

Compiling of STABLE or CURRENT from source will result in the "uname -r" 
command  containing STABLE or CURRENT in the OS name.