On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 13:26, JB <[email protected]> wrote: > The other *BSD are developed sequentially, that is, there is one > branch and each major/minor release cycle follows the previous one > (at no time there is a parallel major/minor branch development). > > In case of FreeBSD, it seems (visually) that there is some mainline > CURRENT branch repository since FreeBSD 1.0 time, from which major > branches are started in parallel (right now there are 8.2-CURRENT > and 9.0-CURRENT developed, if I am correct), and they end their own > life so to speak, without affecting other major branches; but there > were periods of sequential dvelopments as well, e.g. 5.0 thru 5.2. > So, this is the overview, as I see it.
In the past 5.x and prior, I believe things were a bit different, but this represents what has happened for the last several years: There is only one current. It is the main branch in CVS and is where primary development occurs. There are no guarantees with current - the ABI may change at any time, features added/removed, and other major changes made, with the build sometimes broken. Some debugging stuff is turned on by default and there is an expectation that you follow the commit mails and [email protected] list to keep track of things which may affect you. Current is branched off every 18 months (approximately) to make a stable branch. On this branch, the ABI is consistent (applications will not need recompiled due to changes) and backwards compatibility isn't broken within the branch. Nothing is committed directly here - if a change in current meets these criteria, then it may be MFC'ed (merged from current) after it has been proven to work properly (can be several days to weeks/months depending on the severity). There are two supported stable branches right now, 7 and 8. The CVS tags have the form RELENG_8. For current and stable you build your system from source, though snapshots are generated monthly for a convenient starting point. Several times per year, a new release is created from the stable branches - such as 8.1. There is a list on the website of which are currently supported and when they will EoL. Once a release is created, only security fixes and serious errata fixes may be applied on that branch. CVS tags are like RELENG_8_1. These can also be updated with freebsd-update (binary updates). Current is (right now) called 9.0 for cases where a version number is necessary, because that is what will be branched from it next, but it will become 10.0, 11.0, etc. without a new branch in CVS once more stable branches exist. See: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/version-guide/index.html -- Rob Farmer _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
