From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Mar 19 21:16:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from jason.argos.org (jason.argos.org [216.233.245.106]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB70537B734 for ; Mon, 19 Mar 2001 21:16:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@jason.argos.org) Received: (from mike@localhost) by jason.argos.org (8.10.1/8.10.1) id f2K52dM32548; Tue, 20 Mar 2001 00:02:39 -0500 Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 00:02:39 -0500 From: Mike Nowlin To: Matt Martini Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 4.3-BETA Message-ID: <20010320000239.A31887@argos.org> References: <20010319214915.A33199@cec.wustl.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-md5; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK" Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from martini@invision.net on Mon, Mar 19, 2001 at 11:30:16PM -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG --YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > I've read the documentation, and I'm far from being a newbie (having been= at > this since 2.2.5) and I still think the terminology used is confusing. >=20 > If I'm an admin who wants a solid, tested, dare I say stable, operating > system to run in my production enviornment I would want to grab a codebase > called "STABLE." =20 > The -STABLE code is updated every day and is anything but "stable" and the > - -RELEASE branch doesn't change. To my mind this is all backwards. I've been tracking 3- and 4-STABLE on around 30 machines (some started back= at 2.1), and they've been extremely solid. The trick is to not trust the fact that the word "STABLE" is in there - read the lists, and only CVSup/rebuild when you see a week or so of nobody posting major blowups that all seem to have a common set of symptoms. Maintain an in-house CVS mirror that only gets updated when you decide it's time, update a machine that isn't all that important off the mirror & run it for a few days, then update the rest of the machines off the same mirror time/date when you decide it's safe. I've been using this technique for several years, and the worst problem I've really run into was when the seldom-used parallel "geek port" code was broken... (Using it caused a panic on my play box - the one used to test -STABLE releases before applying the updates to the rest of the machine.) A couple hours of deciphering the new parallel port code ended up in a submitted patch that was tested on 5-CURRENT (and a couple of 4-STABLE test boxes) for a few weeks, but was only merged into 4-STABLE after successful testing -- that's the way this whole REL/STA/CUR thing is SUPPOSED to work... :) The biggest difference between -STABLE and -RELEASE is the fact that -RELEA= SE is just a snapshot of -STABLE at a particular time, but there is a code freeze period that essentially "forces" the above-mentioned "week or so (actually longer) of nobody posting major blowups". mike --YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAjq25G8ACgkQJol4I8h9Gd8ymQCdFpO4Zw+cbWoGW0AP3Ym8M4Rr dAgAni7le5JJtW8Q7r91CffyFy1iLcAy =yKfP -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message