Stable vs Release vs Current

[Rob B]

At 10:35 PM 18/02/2004, David Beukes wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Have been using FreeBSD for about a year now but haven't
>understood or found a definitive answer to the
>versions/branches. Would appreciate it if someone could
>shed some light; a bit of history follows:
>
>I installed 1st FreeBSD system from 4.4 (the only cds I
>could get my hands on). By the time I started understanding
>what I was doing, 4.8 was out. So I CVSup'd the source and
>did the whole make buildworld/installworld kernel thing.
>And I was running 4.8... Question here is, was I running
>4.4 release? or 4.4 stable? when did 4.8 become stable (are
>you starting to catch my drift?).

4.4-RELEASE is just 4.4-STABLE at one particular point in time

>Then in December 2003 (about a month after 4.9 was
>announced), I downloaded ISOs for 4.9 and reinstalled from
>scratch. Same questions as before, am I running 4.9 stable?
>release? When did release become stable?

-STABLE becomes -RELEASE when the source tree is tagged with -RELEASE

>Am now running 4.9 and started cvsupping the source. my
>supfile has this line in it: default release=cvs
>tag=RELENG_4_9. Am I wasting my time? Should it rather read
>RELENG_4? If so, why?

That all depends if you want to follow -RELEASE plus security fixes, or if 
you want a (slowly) moving target that is -STABLE


>And where do security patches fit into this story?

See above


>Any info would be helpful.

I suggest re-reading the Handbook, the section on Stable vs Current 
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html) 
is most pertinant.

Cheers,
Rob

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