From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Jun 25 16:14:27 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from zircon.seattle.wa.us (sense-sea-CovadSub-0-228.oz.net [216.39.147.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 3A5AF37B40B for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:14:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from joe@zircon.seattle.wa.us) Received: (qmail 36008 invoked by uid 1001); 25 Jun 2001 23:15:25 -0000 From: Joe Kelsey MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15159.50701.307221.964848@zircon.zircon.seattle.wa.us> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:15:25 -0700 To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: STABLE vs. RELENG X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under Emacs 20.7.1 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jason seems to have missed out on the discussion of the security fix branch, RELENG_X_Y. We really need to update the handbook to indicate that STABLE is only relatively stable. It is a DEVELOPMENT branch, intended to be more stable than CURRENT, but still prone to instability just as all development projects are. Also, there are a lot of people making good and interesting suggestions. I think my comments about upgrading hardware should really be taken seriously. If you intend to try to do a source upgrade from one major release to another you really need up to date hardware or a lot of experience solving hardware/software conflicts. Binary upgrade is the easiest way to go between versions, but the horror stories people have told of prove that it is not foolproof. Perhaps the only safe way to go is to have multiple machines on a local network. Do a fresh install on one, copy the user files over to the new machine and destroy the old machine (or erase the disks or install a new OS...) I think that the FreeBSD project is close to a situation where we can encourage people to operate in "sourceless" mode, at least as far as world/kernel goes. The ports tree already has tools to allow selective fetch and build. The world/kernel area now has binary package updates for security fixes (in world at least) and with kld and sysctl we can probably just ship a useful GENERIC configuration with the instructions on how to load the sound drivers or whatever else you need. This has actually been a better discussion than I at first feared it would be. At least it's not the usual RC/BETA issue... /Joe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message