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.

Comments

No official announcement yet...

[questionlp]

It looks like Slashdot jumped the gun a wee bit too early... the official announcement hasn't been made on their site yet even though the linked Release Notes and other files have been posted here.

I guess it's a good thing about having a script that automatically updates the source tree and does the make world every other night :)

Doesn't this deserve a place on the front page?

[Starship Trooper]

I think enough people use FreeBSD that it's of enough interest to warrant a front page article. All the other FreeBSD releases have been frontpage, I believe.

(cvsupping to 4.6-RELEASE as we speak)

Re:Doesn't this deserve a place on the front page?

[essdodson]

That's it. I've lost complete faith in Slashdot as a news source. A major release of FreeBSD doesn't make it to the front page, yet a patch level to the development Linux kernel does? The only people interested in a patch to the development kernel are those who are actively following kernel development and this is hardly news to them.

Its obvious that this entire site is driven by promoting Linux and downing all others. Submit an article concerning an opensource IRC client being back doored and you'll get rejected. Submit a post concerning a security hole in IIS which was patched 18 months prior and you'll be front page news.

While I understand that Opensource is a driving factor behind this site, the title is still "Slashdot : News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". I move to have this changed to "Slashdot: News for biased Linux nazis, stuff that doesn't matter".

Re:Doesn't this deserve a place on the front page?

[chrisd]

Honestly, I wasn't sure if I was going to put it on the front page, I was even going to revisit the issue when I got murrays post. So it's all moot now.

Chrisd

Re:Doesn't this deserve a place on the front page?

[foobar104]

That's it. I've lost complete faith in Slashdot as a news source.

I agree with you, and I empathize, but nevertheless my first reaction to reading this was a loud "BWAH-HA-HA-HA!"

Slashdot! Heh! As a news source! Heh, heh. Oh, mercy.

Re:Doesn't this deserve a place on the front page?

[scottj]

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.

FreeBSD 4.6

[fdisk3hs]

Recent convert from Linux, Happy B-day FreeBSD.

Now what should I grab, since I'm using 4.6rc1 :)

Re:FreeBSD 4.6

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

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

Re:FreeBSD 4.6

[Fweeky]

Not exactly. In-between a -RELEASE, the stable branch is not guaranteed to always be buildable or working.

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 /testing is probably a good idea.

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 /etc in sync, or parts of the base system changing under you in preperation for the next release.

If you track RELENG_4, you should be prepared to at least watch stable@freebsd.org and keep an eye on /usr/src/UPDATING.

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.

Excuses?

[brad-x]

I'm a little surprised a poster would say the reasons behind the 4.6 release being late are excuses.

EVERY RELEASE HAS DELAYS

This is not a corporation. We do not keep a schedule. We release it when it's ready, slashdot be damned. Don't like it? Jump ship, goodbye, we don't need you on our team. You're not good enough mindshare to work on this project or take part in it.

Congratulations to the core on another release of FreeBSD, keep 'em coming strong.

So I think we're all clear on how murray feels abo

[ealar dlanvuli]

So I think we're all clear on how murray feels about this.

damn't, is it that hard to say "oops sorry"

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[MavEtJu]

I honestly don't think it's that simple. Why are release notes up for it?

Interresting[sp?] point. Why were there so many magazines, websites, books about WindowsME (I think that's the one, I can't keep track of it anymore. I mean the successor of WindowsNT) before the product was on the shelves in the shops? Why are there all these technical documents / HOWTOs already available on the websites before the product is available? It's called preparations! Nobody was able to buy WindowsME before that day, but everybody had read about it and everybody had seen books about.

Why did I get 10 submissions celebrating it's release?

If you go to this url:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/ you will see a list of release-notes, erratas and announcements. Add some creative surfing to it et voila, there is your 4.6 announcement.

I've tried to find it, but no, I couldn't find any direct links to the release notes. Only with creative surfing I could find it.

So, oops, sorry, really don't do it for me, no, not yet.

There is a damned good reason for it:

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.

Screwing it up once, "no problem just don't do it next time". Screwing it up twice, "I told you how this was going to be done, can you *PLEASE* do it right?". Screwing it up three times... Now that's a sign that there is something really wrong.

Re:What we can learn from BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the MIT paper you speak of is completely out of date. Softupdates, dirpref, and plenty of other enhancements to FFS have been added since FreeBSD 2.0, a release which was old news when that website was last updated in June of 1999! The fact that a big cache in memory trumps numerous small writes to a disk hardly comes as a surprise to anyone (but you're SOL in the event of a sudden power failure). I'm really sorry that Linux bigots out there (most of them probably unable to compile hello_world.c) feel threatened by the continued success of BSD, but it's a free country. It's nice that projects like Gentoo have gotten a lot of their ideas from the BSD's instead of fostering a community of illiterate pukes who do little but spread FUD (much like their favorite enemy in the commercial software realm), but they appear to be the exception and not the rule.

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[JabberWokky]

Oh, gimmie a break - this is a tips and rumors site. His whole attitude of "Discussion of The Release is doubleplusungood and Shall Not be done until the Powers That Be bless such an activity" vaguely sickens me. Sure it's bad news reporting, and someone with the initials CD should be slapped with a wet noodle. But this site is made up of contributions. Since when have you ever seen a pile of volunteered contributions without a fishy or off one in the stack? Even over and over. Yeesh, you'd think people would know by know from the duplicate articles that the editors are a rather loose group.

--
Evan "standing next to his grain of salt, not to scale, whenever I read /."

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[bmah]

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)

Whats the rush?

[jdparker]

All the code is readily available on the cvsup servers? Whats the big deal about a release? I'd rather see 5.0-RELEASE wait another 6 months and get the finishing touches on SMPng and the sparc port, as well as all the other cool stuff I've surely missed. Good code takes time, and will come if it's not rushed.

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[Arandir]

Since when have you ever seen a pile of volunteered contributions without a fishy or off one in the stack? Even over and over.

Slashdot may get a million submissions a day, but they only post about ten or twenty of them. That gives them plenty of time to actually check out the story.

This is the third time this has happened with a FreeBSD release, and it's happened to Linux distro releases as well. Is Slashdot deliberately trying to destroy their credibility?

something fishy?

[thanjee]

"something fishy is going on"

Something fishy you say? That would mean a penguin had something to do with it! Unless of course demons eat fish too :p

Well now I just have to wait for FreeBSD.org to give the official word then adownloadin' I will go :)

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[biglig2]

Well, then post "I hear rumurs that FreeBSD 4.6 is released, although if you look at their official site, it isn't". No-one would object to that, other than that it's a stupid thing to post.

It's not like people expect detailed fact checking on /. but for something you can check with a visit to one web site, that you've been asked not to report prematurely twice in the past....

Spreading trojanned copies of FreeBSD?

[palfreman]

I was interested to se that Murray Stokely asked if the poster of the story was "trying to help the spread of trojanned copies of FreeBSD" Why would he think that? It is a serious thing to alledge. Is it likely that someone was trying to?

Re:So I think we're all clear on how murray feels

[JabberWokky]

Is Slashdot deliberately trying to destroy their credibility?

What credibility? This is a forum for a bunch of like minded people to gather on the net. Just like everything else, consider the source. /. is dead on about some things, and horribly off about others, just like a bunch of techies in the break room waiting for coffee to brew.

Of course, so is the "credible media", which consistantly refered to the nonexistant "anthrax virus" for a few months. It's high school level science to know the difference between a virus and bacterium, and every major news outlet has a high paid science editor, plus several consultants. And yet the media got it wrong over and over again.

Me? I take stuff on Slashdot as someone calling a neat "fact" over a cube wall - you check it out yourself.

--
Evan

Feelings.

[saintlupus]

So I think we're all clear on how murray feels about this.

Yeah, he feels that the editorial staff are a pack of unprofessional assclowns who can't be bothered to perform the sort of rudimentary fact-checking demanded of the average high school newspaper.

And hey presto, he's right.

--saint

Oh dear

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, Slashdot really is a load of shit sometimes. The editors clearly can't learn from pervious mistakes, and would never keep a job going in real-life professional journalism.

FreeBSD 4.6 Released

[cperciva]

The (real) announcement came out a couple hours ago; presumably it will appear on the freebsd.org website at 0800 UTC when the site is rebuilt.

The announcement...

[cperciva]

Delivered-To: freebsd-announce@freebsd.org
To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE is now available
From: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG (Bruce A. Mah)
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 16:34:26 -0700
Sender: owner-freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG

I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE in January 2002, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, and addressed a wide variety of security issues.

One of the most significant changes in FreeBSD 4.6 is the adoption of XFree86 4.2.0 as the default version of the X Windows System. We encourage users (particularly those upgrading from older installations of XFree86) to consult the relevant section of the FreeBSD Handbook for information on installing and configuring XFree86 4.2.0. This information can be found on-line at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/x11.html

On systems with the doc distribution installed, it can also be found at:

/usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handb ook/x11.html

A number of enhancements to network device drivers have been made, as well as updates to the ATA storage subsystem.

Some contributed programs have been updated, such as sendmail (updated to 8.12.3) and the ISC DHCP client (updated to 3.0.1RC8).

For more information about the most significant changes with this release of FreeBSD, please see the release notes:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.6R/relnotes.html

It is also useful to peruse the errata file, as it contains late-breaking news about the release:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.6R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities (including a schedule of upcoming releases), please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

Availability
------------

FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE supports the i386 and alpha architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for the i386 are available now. Final builds for the alpha architecture are in progress and will be made available shortly.

We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from:

ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.au.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.lt.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.nctu.edu.tw/FreeBSD/

If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images, otherwise please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies have contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD:

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
FreeBSD Services Ltd. http://www.freebsd-services.com/
Daemon News http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

Each CD or DVD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4 CD set, or the DVD distribution from FreeBSD Services Ltd.

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Trantor, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/install.html

Acknowledgments
---------------

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.6, including Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.6-RELEASE includes:

Murray Stokely : Release Engineering Lead, i386 Builds
Robert Watson : Release Engineering
John Baldwin : Release Engineering, alpha Builds
Brian Somers : Release Engineering
Steve Price : Package Splits
Will Andrews : Package Splits
Kris Kennaway : Package Building
David O'Brien : XFree86 Integration

Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into making this release. Many thanks are also due to the FreeBSD committers , without whom there would be nothing to release, and thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who have contributed bug fixes, features, and suggestions.

Enjoy!

Bruce A. Mah
(For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)