Re: freebsd naming of releases

Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> Charles Swiger wrote:
>>>I find that the terms "alpha", "beta" and "production" do not quite 
>>>fit the FreeBSD development paradigm. (Is RELENG_5 beta or 
>>>production?)
>>
>>It's beta.  -CURRENT (or RELENG_6) is alpha, and production is now at
> 
> 
> Wrong: Current != Alpha.
>   Industry common parlance of "Alpha Release" is per se a sort of (pre) release.
>   FreeBSD Current is continuously moving & not a release;  eg cvs -r HEAD 

I know that HEAD is continuously moving.  Saying code is "in alpha" does not 
imply that it is ready for release or being put through a release cycle.

I suppose that someone comfortable with the term "alpha release" would also be 
happy with the notion of "paid beta releases": software made publicly 
available to all customers (which is my definition of "going into production", 
or perhaps "going into production but trying to avoid providing real support 
even if people have paid for the software" is closer :-).

> Perhaps you equated Alpha & Current because that's the first one
> has access to from commercial companies & FreeBSD respectively, but
> that doesnt make them the same thing.  Binaries from a commercial
> company's current one wouldn't normally see (let alone the source :-).

No, my definition of alpha means "code that works well enough to implement at 
least some major features, but may be missing other features and is expected 
to contain significant bugs which make it unwise to depend on the system for 
production use".  Windows jokes aside, commercial companies don't normally 
release alpha code to the outside world.

Beta means "code that is basicly feature-complete modulo bugs, is ready for 
outside testing, but still contains significant bugs and is not guaranteed to 
be stable for production" (as in, "beta code is not supported").

In FreeBSD, one critereon for whether a release is in production, is whether a 
security advisory results in that branch being updated.  The recent release of 
  FreeBSD-SA-05:01.telnet resulted in RELENG_5_3, RELENG_4_11, and RELENG_4_10 
being updated as well as HEAD, RELENG_5, & RELENG_4.  (Maybe 4.8, too.)

-- 
-Chuck