Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:33:32 -0400 From: Ernie Luzar <luzar722@gmail.com> To: Matthew Seaman <matthew@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 11.1 ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta and RC builds Message-ID: <5943356C.8060205@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <6be7fab4-4e34-8adf-4f03-c8c59a3e544e@FreeBSD.org> References: <5942EB59.8040807@gmail.com> <6be7fab4-4e34-8adf-4f03-c8c59a3e544e@FreeBSD.org>
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Matthew Seaman wrote: > On 15/06/2017 21:17, Ernie Luzar wrote: >> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/schedule.html >> >> Shows no alpha builds. Is it normal to start the release build process >> with beta builds skipping the alpha builds? >> >> I see ISO-IMAGES for 11.1 beta1. I don't remembering seeing ISO-IMAGES >> for previous alpha, beta and RC build releases. Is this a new change to >> existing procedures? Are we going to see ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta and >> RC builds from now on? >> >> Where does snapshot prerelease fit into the alpha, beta and RC build >> process? >> >> Is this documented someplace? > > The alpha builds are internal to Release Engineering -- they're > essentially just a sanity check that the code to go into the release > doesn't have obvious problems. The beta builds are the first ones > released to the public for wider testing, once RE is satisfied that they > won't cause your machine to spit chunks of harddrive all over the floor > or other faux-pas. > > Yes, pre-release iso images have been released historically for people > to download and do test installs. It's pretty hard to get people to > test releases in any case, so making it as convenient as possible for > people to install is a good idea. > > The 'snapshot' referred to in the release schedule is a tag created in > the code repository so that the precise BETA1 or BETA2 or whatever code > can be checked out in a repeatable way. The BETAs are built against the > 11-STABLE branch in SVN, which is the main and fairly active development > branch for all 11.x code. So the BETAs could evolve quite rapidly, > although we're in a code-freeze at the moment and all commits to > 11-STABLE require RE approval. > > Once the BETAs have proven satisfactory, the 11.1-RELEASE branch will be > created. This means two things: first, and commits to 11-STABLE after > the branch point will not appear in 11.1-RELEASE unless specifically > merged (so the RE lock on commit approvals to 11-STABLE will be lifted). > Second: the release branch is effectively in feature-freeze at this > point and only fixes for issues discovered during testing will be applied. > > This is basically the same process that has been used since around > 6.0-RELEASE. > > Cheers, > > Matthew > > Thank you for the details. Let me reword this to be sure I understand what you said. All BETA, RC, and RELEASE builds have ISO-IMAGES created, and the result in the "uname -r" command will contain BETA, RC, or RELEASE as part of the OS name. Snapshots for alpha, PRERELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT builds do not have ISO-IMAGES created and the result of the "uname -r" command will contain PRERELEASE, STABLE or CURRENT as part of the OS name. Compiling of STABLE or CURRENT from source will result in the "uname -r" command containing STABLE or CURRENT in the OS name.
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