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Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 19:46:05 +0100
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: J B <jb.1234abcd@gmail.com>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: RELEASE vice CURRENT vice STABLE
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On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 14:42:09 +0100, J B <jb.1234abcd@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have:
> $ uname -r
> 8.1-RELEASE
> installed.
> 
> I understand the concept of software dev, and RELEASE (a snapshot in time),
> and CURRENT as a dev branch, and STABLE as a dev branch followed CURRENT.
> But I have difficulty placing them in a dev and respository tree.
> 
> For example, in my case, can I describe it as below
> 8.1-RELEASE -> 8.2-CURRENT -> 8.2-STABLE -> 8.2-RCn -> 8.2-RELEASE
> and the cycle repeats ?

Not quite. RELEASE and STABLE are points in time of the
CURRENT development branch. The difference is that CURRENT
is "experimental", this means changes go there, and maybe
get removed. A CURRENT system, updated at 3:00, even may
not compile, and updated later on at 5:00, it will. The
changes that have been considered "good" go to STABLE.
STABLE usually always compiles and runs. RELEASE is always
considered a "high quality" point in the development cycle.
Even the ports tree is frozen for some time to make RELEASE
a good release. PRERELEASE and RC are made from STABLE.
STABLE gets all the working functionality from CURRENT
that is "good", and will therefore be the basis of RELEASE.
The security patches are also made from this basis, they
accompany RELEASE.

See the text file /usr/share/misc/bsd-family-tree for
details.






-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...