stable vs releng

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 22:41:37 +0100, Paul Macdonald via freebsd-questions wrote:
> Like many i suspect, i have a bunch of boxes on releng, as that used to 
> be the long term support branch.
> 
> Thats all changed obv , and stable is now the long term support branch.

That sounds wrong.



> q1) Is it any easier now to change from a releng branch to stable

Obtain the sources via SVN, then follow the instructions in
the comment header of /usr/src/Makefile. A -STABLE version
needs to be built from source.

In order to update -RELEASE, you can use the binary method
of freebbsd-update, resulting in -RELEASE-pX, where X is the
number of the patchlevel. This is how you get your security
updates on the long run.

The security updates are "backported" (not the correct term
here, I know) from -STABLE, which in turn is a point in time
during development at -HEAD / -CURRENT. The word "stable"
emphasizes that the ABI is _stable_ (so you won't have
to re-install ports, as it often is required when you
change releases, even though there are the "compat"
packages you can use).

More information here:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html

https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes.html

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/current-vs-stable-vs-release.3716/



> q2)  the offical freebsd download links all link to releng, where is 
> stable for iso/img downloads?

There are no such downloads, except maybe development snapshots
of -STABLE and -CURRENT which are probably more interesting to
developers and testers, not to users. That's the primary reason
no installation media is provided - this is usually generated
from -RELEASE.

This is an example:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/arm64/11.2-STABLE

Check the surrounding directories for more snapshots. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...