Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 00:03:06 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some more '-BETA', but not for -STABLE Message-ID: <p0501040fb6d89b813c0d@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <p0501040bb6d8856b0b5d@[128.113.24.47]> References: <20010316151120.B98051@dragon.nuxi.com> <200103162339.QAA18793@usr07.primenet.com> <20010316160957.A98966@dragon.nuxi.com> <p0501040bb6d8856b0b5d@[128.113.24.47]>
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At 10:48 PM -0500 3/16/01, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>The problem with claiming that "freebsd's cycle is just like
>any other company", is that other companies do NOT have the
>equivalent of "stable". When Windows98 went into beta, it
>had several million lines of coding changes which had not
>been tested on any customers machines. THAT is what they
>mean by beta. We mean "there is something of a code-freeze
>going on in the life of -stable".
Something of a revelation hit me. Okay now, stop yawning.
The issue with comparing OS releases between freebsd and
standard OS companies is exactly that those companies do
not really have anything like -stable and current. What *WE*
call "freebsd-current" is (in practice) very close to what a
company like Microsoft or Apple would call a "beta release".
From this comes the thought:
In the release cycle of a *-CURRENT-* branch, we definitely
SHOULD call it "beta" as we are get close to releasing it.
I will have absolutely no misgivings when it comes time for
freebsd-current to turn into 5.0-beta.
In that case, it IS beta. We DO want more people using it
than would usually use -current, but IT IS STILL BETA. It
has a lot of very dramatic changes in it wrt -stable, and
people SHOULD be wary of it.
I (for one) do not have the same feeling when 4.2-stable
turned into 4.3-beta. While there is some rush to MFC
things for release, the rate of change isn't really all
that much different than it is on any other day in the
life of stable. In fact, as we get further into 4.3-beta,
the code in that branch is changing LESS rapidly than
usual, as the "code slush" turns into a code freeze.
The more this is discussed, the more I think it is just
plain wrong to use the same term for the "pre-release"
of a minor version as we also use for the TRULY BETA
release of a major version.
So I think the life of a major branch should be, eg:
5.0-current
5.0-beta
5.0-release-candidate [1,2,3,4,...]
5.0-release
5.0-stable
5.1-pre-release (or 5.1-preview, or 5.1-precursor)
5.1-release
5.1-stable
How does this sound to people?
C'mon. At least stop yawning.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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