Question: the stable edition of Freebsd

[Steven Susbauer]

Jerry McAllister wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:01:21PM +0800, Alex Zhang wrote:
>
>>Dear Support:
>>  I'm a newcomer and want to install FreeBSD for study. Could you pls let 
>>me
>>know which the stable edition of FreeBSD now?
>>
>>And let me know how to subscribe the Q&A list that I prefer.
>>
>>Thanks in advance.
>>
>
>All of this is well documented on the FreeBSD website (www.freebsd.org)
>
>For informatino on the mailing lists, go to:
>   http://www.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html
>or
>   http://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo and look around.
>
>The version setup in FreeBSD can be a little confusing for newcomers
>because the terms stable and current are used in very specific ways - 
>formally defined rather than in the more loose general conversation
>way we often use them.
>
>Current is the bleeding edge of development work - nothing is guaranteed
>and stable is the development branch that is actually intended to 
>eventually
>become the next new version -- rather than current being the official 
>present version out or stable being the most reliable version as one might 
>guess from just the words before studying the documentation..
>Check this part of the handbook:
>  
>http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html
>
>If you are a FreeBSD beginning, what you want is a RELEASE version.
>The latest at the moment are 6.3 and 7.0    In the present form of
>the web page, the latest RELEASEs plus the next two are listed right
>there on the first page.
>
>Other information on upcoming releases can be found on the Release
>Engineering page:
>                    http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html
>
>By the way, "releng" stands for Release Engineering here and when
>you track a version for security updates you track a RELENG version.
>
>So, if you installed FreeBSD 7.1, then in your csupfile you would put:
>
>   *default tag=RELENG_7_1
>
>That would get you the security updates for FreeBSD 7.1
>
>If you wanted to jump up to stable you would put:
>
>   *default tag=RELENG_7
>
>and that would be the stable version of the FreeBSD 7 branch.
>But, the funny thing about it is that the STABLE line is not mean
>that it is actually stable.   They try to assure that it compiles
>and builds.   And, usually it is pretty good.   But it hasn't gone
>through all the official builds and been run against all the known
>problem sets as has a RELEASE when it is 'released'.
>
>So, for now, just install a RELEASE - probably 7.1 if you can wait
>or 7.0 right now and track the security fixes by csup-ing to RELENG_7_1
>or RELENG_7_0
>
>Have fun,
>
>////jerry
If using a release, can he not use freebsd-update to keep current on
fixes rather than rebuilding everything? On a slow system, the more
binary the better.

  -Steve