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

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Eygene Ryabinkin wrote:

> Christian, good day.
> 
> Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 03:52:14PM +0200, Christian Baer wrote:
> > 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. 

The handbook explicitly explains it:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
23.2.2.1 What Is FreeBSD-STABLE?

FreeBSD-STABLE is our development branch from which major releases are 
made. Changes go into this branch at a different pace, and with the 
general assumption that they have first gone into FreeBSD-CURRENT for 
testing. This is still a development branch, however, and this means that 
at any given time, the sources for FreeBSD-STABLE may or may not be 
suitable for any particular purpose. It is simply another engineering 
development track, not a resource for end-users.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

> > 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.
> 
> But let us look at the issue from the user's side: where can he get
> RELENG_6?  Only cvsup, CTM and monthly snapshots come into my mind.

I would think that someone who uses these tools may look into the 
handbook. I would guess that most people get the idea of updating via 
sources from the handbook so this part is hard to miss.

And it is headlined "Chapter 23 The Cutting Edge", btw.

However, I tried to find information about the RELENG tags useful for 
production systems in the handbook.

The only place I find them mentioned is in the appendix: "A.7.1 Branch 
Tags".

"14.14 FreeBSD Security Advisories" don't mention RELENG tags.

So the use of RELENG tags is not that obvious for a newcomer I think. 
Maybe we should add a comment in the Chapters 23 (Cutting Edge) and 14.14 
(Security advisories).

To come up with good names isn't that easy. Look at Debian: stable, 
unstable, testing. It's different but not better I think.

Fortunatelly the most FreeBSD releases deserve the attribute stable:-) So 
when I maintained FreeBSD servers I rarely saw a reason to update to "the 
kernel of the week". Besides of some security patches I just did it once 
in a while to a new release, just to keep servers in sync.

Of course carefully. Every change of a running system (not only if it's 
FreeBSD;-) is a risk.

BTW: Even my -CURRENT desktop is more stable than a Fedora release I had 
to endure at work for a while:-)

Regards
Peter