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Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:06:15 +0000
From: Josh Paetzel <friar_josh@tcbug.org>
To: Ron Sweeney <sween@modelm.org>
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cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: releases and stable for dummies
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On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 11:06:20AM -0500, Ron Sweeney wrote:
> 
> 
> Can somebody please give me a brief overview of the roadmap between
> releases and stable and how to determine which release is truly STABLE for
> a production environment?
> 
> I have struggled making any sense with the number of releases and
> documentation.
> 

To make a long story short, a RELEASE is a snapshot of STABLE from a 
particular moment in time.  The development of STABLE is frozen for a couple 
weeks prior to a RELEASE to make sure that a RELEASE is as stable and bug-free
as possible.  This is true of the 4.x line of development.  For 5.x a RELEASE 
is a snapshot of CURRENT.  The official party line is that 4.x is for 
production servers, while 5.x is for early adopters, although a fair number of 
people are using 5.x machines in production environments without issue.

See the following link for the rest of the story...

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html

Josh Paetzel