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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!nctuccca.edu.tw!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: When is 2.2R due out? Date: 3 May 1996 16:13:17 GMT Organization: Private FreeBSD site, Dresden Lines: 44 Message-ID: <4mdbat$hqu@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4lgt27$rme@church.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <4ljdbg$ng0@uriah.heep.sax.de> <DqI2w3.DyI@news2.new-york.net> <31844830.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> <DqoIwz.2KC@news2.new-york.net> <4m6lmp$4rs@complete.org> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 jgoerzen@complete.org (John Goerzen) writes: >Geez... The system is complex enough with current, stable, SNAP, release, >etc.... (I still don't know the difference between stable and release..) Releases are something fixed. Once they are out, that's about it. They happen whenever the system development has settled well enough, and all the necessary release engineering steps have been passed. -current is (well, you guess it :) the current development system, just in the state as it is right now this minute. -current as of yesterday 09:00:00 UTC might be quite different from -current as of yesterday 12:00:00 UTC, or from -current just now. -stable is also a moving target, but with the intention that only bugfixes will go in. It has been branched off the main trunk some day in the past (before the last release [2.1] has been created), and patches where the developers are sure that they are bugfixes rather than new features are often (if it's possible at all) also applied to this branch tree. This forms a virtual source tree in the CVS repository that continues the line of 2.1 systems, and will eventually yield a 2.1.X release some day, which will then be a bugfix-mostly upgrade from 2.1 where all the (potentially more buggy) new features of -current are not present. SNAPs are a simple snapshot of some status quo of either source tree (the main trunk -- making a `-current' SNAP, or possibly the 2.1 branch, resulting in a 2.1.X SNAP). They are made available since many people wish to get access to more recent sources than the latest release, but don't have the resources to track -current (or -stable) on a day by day basis, and thus prefer a system that is bundled together with the installation tools and whatever else usually accompanies a full release (ports, packages), even though it is _not_ a release since it didn't undergo all the release engineering steps (quality assurance). Lately, Walnut Creek even started to make them available on CD-ROM so interested users without a good Internet connectivity could also benefit of them. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)