understanding freebsd development logic

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 02:25:59PM -0800, prad wrote:
> i am puzzled by what seems to be almost a parallel processor development
> model that exists with freebsd. when 7 came out people were still
> working on 6.3 i think it was with the aim of going to 6.4 and now with
> 7.x underway, there is work being do for 8 (for which you can get a
> snapshot cd. (i seem to recall something similar with debian too).
> 
> why would people work on 7.x (and 6.x as well i guess) if 8 is already
> available?

The CURRENT branch (which will become 8.x) is for the hackers to play in
and to give them the opportunity to introduce big, rapid changes without
messing up machines that need to be usable. Some changes might not even
compile at first or lead to crashes.

So the 7.x releases and the 7-STABLE branch is focused more on
reliability and bugfixes.

One older branch 6.x is maintained as a legacy branch for people who
cannot switch to 7.x.

For a more in-depth explanation, see
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html 

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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