Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 21:48:16 +0200 From: Christoph Sold <so@server.i-clue.de> To: Lysenko Alexey Victorovich <rainbow@inter-trade.dn.ua> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I need Your advice Message-ID: <39639100.325A69B3@i-clue.de> References: <004301bfe660$84261380$1e0110ac@intertrade.dn.ua>
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> Lysenko Alexey Victorovich wrote: > > Dear People from FreeBSD org ! > > I'm Alexey Lysenko from Ukraine. > > Please, tell me the main designation and the difference between > FreeBSD Unix 3.5(June !) and 4.0 (March)? Why not 3.4 -> 3.5 -> 4.0 ? That's because FreeBSD Maintains two different versions at all time, in time of big changes event three versions are maintained in parallel. All this can be found explained in great length in the FreeBSD handbook (now in print, a very nice Thing To Have Now), also available at http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/. To put a long story short: FreeBSD-5.0 is the CURRENT version. Developers put their changes in this version without notice. This leads to problems, which will be removed as development proceeds. FreeBSD-4.0 (and soon, FreeBSD-4.1) is the STABLE version. In this code base, only known bugs are fixed, and enhancements are merged from 5.0-CURRENT only after thorught testing. FreeBSD-3.5 is the final release of the previous version: there are still a lot of 3.x boxes in production, and you cannot update 3.x -> 4.x without reboot. Thus, those boxes will remain 3.x, and 3.5 is the last release which is supported. Whats that complicated scheme about? In fact, it's pretty simple. There's a developer version, where all the coders work. During that, the system may become unstable. No good if you like a production environment. That's what stable is for: a stable production environment. After a period of development, the code gurus declare the CURRENT version frozen, and only bugs will be fixed there. Then current becomes the new stable, a new current thread will be opened, and the just obsoleted old stable thread will still be maintained until the dust settled on the fresh stable version: the x.0 release is usually not as stable as stable was before. Sorry for the explanations length. Watch the production cycle one more time, and you'll understand fully. HTH -Christoph Sold To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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