11.1 ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta and RC builds

[JD]

On 06/15/2017 07:33 PM, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> Matthew Seaman wrote:
>> On 15/06/2017 21:17, Ernie Luzar wrote:
>>> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.1R/schedule.html
>>>
>>> Shows no alpha builds. Is it normal to start the release build process
>>> with beta builds skipping the alpha builds?
>>>
>>> I see ISO-IMAGES for 11.1 beta1. I don't remembering seeing ISO-IMAGES
>>> for previous alpha, beta and RC build releases. Is this a new change to
>>> existing procedures?  Are we going to see ISO-IMAGES for alpha, beta 
>>> and
>>> RC builds from now on?
>>>
>>> Where does snapshot prerelease fit into the alpha, beta and RC build
>>> process?
>>>
>>> Is this documented someplace?
>>
>> The alpha builds are internal to Release Engineering -- they're
>> essentially just a sanity check that the code to go into the release
>> doesn't have obvious problems.  The beta builds are the first ones
>> released to the public for wider testing, once RE is satisfied that they
>> won't cause your machine to spit chunks of harddrive all over the floor
>> or other faux-pas.
>>
>> Yes, pre-release iso images have been released historically for people
>> to download and do test installs.  It's pretty hard to get people to
>> test releases in any case, so making it as convenient as possible for
>> people to install is a good idea.
>>
>> The 'snapshot' referred to in the release schedule is a tag created in
>> the code repository so that the precise BETA1 or BETA2 or whatever code
>> can be checked out in a repeatable way.  The BETAs are built against the
>> 11-STABLE branch in SVN, which is the main and fairly active development
>> branch for all 11.x code.  So the BETAs could evolve quite rapidly,
>> although we're in a code-freeze at the moment and all commits to
>> 11-STABLE require RE approval.
>>
>> Once the BETAs have proven satisfactory, the 11.1-RELEASE branch will be
>> created.  This means two things: first, and commits to 11-STABLE after
>> the branch point will not appear in 11.1-RELEASE unless specifically
>> merged (so the RE lock on commit approvals to 11-STABLE will be lifted).
>>  Second: the release branch is effectively in feature-freeze at this
>> point and only fixes for issues discovered during testing will be 
>> applied.
>>
>> This is basically the same process that has been used since around
>> 6.0-RELEASE.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>
>>     Matthew
>>
>>
>
> Thank you for the details. Let me reword this to be sure I understand 
> what you said.
>
> All BETA, RC, and RELEASE builds have ISO-IMAGES created, and the 
> result in the "uname -r" command will contain BETA, RC, or RELEASE as 
> part of the OS name.
>
> Snapshots for alpha, PRERELEASE, STABLE and CURRENT builds do not have 
> ISO-IMAGES created and the result of the "uname -r" command will 
> contain PRERELEASE, STABLE or CURRENT as part of the OS name.
>
> Compiling of STABLE or CURRENT from source will result in the "uname 
> -r" command  containing STABLE or CURRENT in the OS name.
In my previous experiences of downloading ISO images of STABLE, CURRENT, 
the output of uname -a always contained the version name - i.e. STABLE 
or CURRENT.  I do not recall downloading pre-release ISO's.