Tracking 4-stable rather than 4.8-stable

[Michael Nottebrock]

On Monday 26 May 2003 08:38, Jukka Huvinen wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2003, Michael Nottebrock wrote:

> > Packages for -stable are updated on a regular basis, but only ever so
> > often. Don't expect a package to be available in the order of days after
> > a port has been upgraded.
>
> Hello! I'm also confused with getting _stable_ packages.
>
> How does it actually occur?
>
> If I update the ports collection with cvsup, it becomes to "current".
> (tag=.) I think there is no alternative, tag=RELENG_4 does not fetch the
> tree.

That's correct. The terminology is confusing, but it's not really complicated: 
The FreeBSD build cluster basically builds packages for RELENG_4 and 
5-CURRENT, for all available platforms, from the same, unified 
ports-collection. These are mirrored to various ftp sites around the globe. 
Now look at the directory on FreeBSD's primary ftp server that contains 
various packages for the i386 platform: 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386 .

If you compare for example 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4.6.2-release/x11 ,
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4.8-release/x11 and
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/x11 , you will 
notice that they all contain different versions of XFree86-libraries: 
4.2.0_1, 4.3.0_1 and 4.3.0_3. This because they all represent different 
_snapshots_ of the ports collection.

So the "stable" packages are not build from a (nonexistent) RELENG_4 ports 
collection, they just represent a snapshot of the ports collection at a time 
where FreeBSD's RELENG_4 branch itself is -STABLE (as in uname -a output). As 
you can see in that ftp directory, this works in a similar fashion for 
5.0-RELEASE vs. 5-CURRENT.

-- 
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