Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD v.4.6 (NOT) Released
A FreeBSD fan writes "FreeBSD 4.6 was just released. It's a relief to see it arrive after a myriad of delays and excuses caused it to be held back. As always, with every new version, FreeBSD becomes even faster and more secure than before. Please be sure to find a mirror here before downloading." Update: There's been an update to the story, please note that "something fishy is going on"
Murray Stokely writes "We have gone over this for the past 2 releases now. I thought I had made it clear that you were not to publish information about FreeBSD being released until you saw a signed PGP message from one of the release engineers. Are you trying to help the spread of trojanned copies of FreeBSD? The release is not ready yet, and will not be until the front page of FreeBSD.org is updated and a PGP signed announcement message is posted to announce@FreeBSD.org." So I think we're all clear on how murray feels about this.
Chrisd
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
As the person who committed the 4.6 release documentation to the FreeBSD Web site, I can pretty authoritatively say why these files were there in advance of the release. The reason is so that when Murray (or whomever else) makes the release announcement, the pages pointed to by the release announcement are already on the main Web site. It basically makes it easier for users to find the information they need.
But these pages had (have) no inbound links to them at all. The fact that some people had to do some "creative surfing" to actually find the release documentation should really have been a clue that the release wasn't ready yet. If we *had* released, wouldn't it be kind of silly to keep this information obscured?
This wouldn't be such a big deal except we had a very similar situation in 4.5 with someone posting a bogus release announcement to Slashdot (and having it slip past the editors). I really hope there isn't a third time.
Oh yes. I'm also the person who wrote the so-called "delays and excuses" message. I didn't see it as making excuses for anything. I wanted to give our users some explanation as to why things would be delayed.
Peace,
Bruce A. Mah
(Member, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)
no, bleeding edge for freebsd is -current. (aka 5.0-current). -stable is, well, stable. None of this Linux "oh-we'll-just-totatly-change-the-virtual-memory- system-in-the-stable-tree" crap.
-stable == STABLE
Not exactly. In-between a -RELEASE, the stable branch is not guaranteed to always be buildable or working.
/testing is probably a good idea.
/etc in sync, or parts of the base system changing under you in preperation for the next release.
/usr/src/UPDATING.
RELENG_4 is the STABLE development branch most people who track STABLE use; this is where prereleases arrive and things are merged from current (MFC); the biggest recent change was an MFC of the new ATA subsystem. New versions of sendmail and smallish changes to the rc system can happen here too.
Although MFC'd stuff is only done so after a lot of testing, and commits to this branch are usually fine, it is still a development branch. Treating it somewhat like Debian
For a truely stable up to date system, you should track the RELENG_4_<release> branches, which are the security-update branches for individual releases. Track RELENG_4_6 for 4.6 and you know you won't need to worry too much about running mergemaster to keep
If you track RELENG_4, you should be prepared to at least watch stable@freebsd.org and keep an eye on
And while we're on the subject, remember that cvsup is quite IO intensive; keep your cvsup's conservative. Once a day is usually a bit over the top, and just serves to increase the load on the servers. http://freshports.net/ and ports@freebsd.org are good resources to help decide when it's worth supping.
Don't feed the trolls!
If you really want to know when a new release of FreeBSD is available, /. is just not the answer. Subscribe to the freebsd-announce list for some better coverage.
.-.--