Stable vs Release vs Current

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 01:35:20PM +0200, David Beukes wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Have been using FreeBSD for about a year now but haven't
> understood or found a definitive answer to the
> versions/branches. Would appreciate it if someone could
> shed some light; a bit of history follows:
> 
> I installed 1st FreeBSD system from 4.4 (the only cds I
> could get my hands on). By the time I started understanding
> what I was doing, 4.8 was out. So I CVSup'd the source and
> did the whole make buildworld/installworld kernel thing.
> And I was running 4.8... Question here is, was I running
> 4.4 release? or 4.4 stable? when did 4.8 become stable (are
> you starting to catch my drift?).
> 
> Then in December 2003 (about a month after 4.9 was
> announced), I downloaded ISOs for 4.9 and reinstalled from
> scratch. Same questions as before, am I running 4.9 stable?
> release? When did release become stable?
> 
> Am now running 4.9 and started cvsupping the source. my
> supfile has this line in it: default release=cvs
> tag=RELENG_4_9. Am I wasting my time? Should it rather read
> RELENG_4? If so, why?
> 
> And where do security patches fit into this story? 
> 
> Any info would be helpful.


All the 4.x releases are essentially snapshots of the RELENG_4
development branch.
4.4-STABLE refers to the RELENG_4 branch at any time after 4.4-RELEASE
was created, but before 4.5-RELEASE was created. (And by the same
reasoning 4.8-STABLE refers to the RELENG_4 branch between 4.8-RELEASE
and 4.9-RELEASE.)

If you install from a CD you will get 4.x-RELEASE.
If you cvsup from the RELENG_4 branch you will get 4.x-STABLE, where
4.x is the most recent release. (You could also use cvsup to get some
particular release if you wish, but that is rarely done.)

If you should use RELENG_4_9 or RELENG_4 is a matter of taste.
RELENG_4_9 is 4.9-RELEASE+security fixes only, and is therefore much
less likely to introduce new bugs than the RELENG_4 branch, but you
won't get any new features or non-critical bug fixes on the other hand.


For more information you could read the following texts which should
answer most of your questions:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/admin.html#RELEASE-CANDIDATE           
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/index.html 
http://www.freebsd.org/security/index.html#adv




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se