Re: suggest renaming and extending the -CURRENT and -STABLE lines

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:39:59 +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des_at_des.no> wrote:
> Christian Baer <christian.baer_at_uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>> If someone sees the result of RELENG_6 is called STABLE, he or she will
>> problably think, this is the line where bug fixes are added, security
>> problems fixed and the whole thing is meant for production systems.
> While
>> the first two things may be true, I would not suggest RELENG_6 for
>> production systems. Normally the -STABLE line works fine. But I *have*
>> times in the past where a driver was changes and suddenly the system
>> *didn't* work after a reboot or showed strange behaviour.
> 
> YMMV.  I run both CURRENT and STABLE on production systems.
> 
Which is higly interesting and important and has basically nothing to do with the original mail / question by the original author ;-)

Back to topic?
The problem is, that STABLE in FreeBSD-speak is meant as API Stable, not stable in regards to a broken driver or in regards to a branch where the source is frozen.
However, I do agree with the original author that it leads to confusion, because API stabilitiy is not the first thing that pops into your mind when you read FreeBSD 6-STABLE ;-)

I tend to believe that a renaming won't happen, though. AFAIK the naming convention in FreeBSD haven't changed since... well... forever? ;)
It may became something like a holy cow :)

My thoughts.

Cheers,
Marian

PS.: I managed to run CURRENT from yesterday on a IBM HS21 Blade with this bloody mpt(4) and bce(4) chipsets. It works! Thumbs Up! The bce(4) was panicing in earlier CURRENTs I tried :)