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FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Status Update
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."
So will this be the last non-merged release?
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
But does it run Linux?
What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. Our take: we fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product. Thanks mezz, our forums moderator for the newstip.
[Read full announcement]
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 16:23:25 -0800
From: "Bruce A. Mah"
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: 4.8-RELEASE status
Hi--
A number of you have been (rightfully) wondering what's up with
the i386 4.8-RELEASE. Here's the current state:
The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE
can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes
on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk.
This bug was masked by another problem that happened to be present on
the machines used by the RE team to build releases...namely, that they
didn't have the cvsroot-all collection in their local repositories.
To make a long story short, the $FreeBSD$ tags didn't get expanded in
the source files, thus (I am not making this up) causing the MFSROOT
kernel to be just a *little* bit smaller so that it could fit on a
floppy. I think this was the world's April Fool's joke to the RE
team.
We're currently trying to fix this by finding some other driver we can
move to a module on the mfsroot.flp image (or maybe just eliminate).
After we finish some tests, we'll need to commit whatever change is
required, re-tag the affected files, and then rebuild the base system.
I'm not in a position to comment on a timeline for these happenings.
Thanks for your continued patience!
Bruce.
PS. This may sound rude, for which I apologize in advance: The less
time that the RE team has to spend replying to various emails
(particularly those that are not relevant to the immediate goal of
shipping 4.8-RELEASE), the faster the release is probably going to be
finished.
Yes, yes you can. I'm running 4.8 right now, although I'd recommend using the RELENG_4_8 tag so that you get any patches made.
"The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk."
It's 2003 and a sparkling new Unix OS is being held up by... a floppy?
I remember floppies... I used them back in the 80's and very early 90's.
I'm glad that they are sticking by their principles on this. I just wonder if they are principles worth sticking to.
--Richard
Download or Buy a cd for Newbies ?
However, that doesnt stop us from making fun of a major For Profit software company for doing similiar things. This in no way makes us feel like hypocrits, strangely enough.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
This is good slashdot fodder, but the issue has been resolved. The awi driver (wireless prism card) is being removed from the floppy and the space problem is solved. Move along nothing to see here...
"We" are the world. "We" are the children.
Guess you haven't heard "our" song.
Best Windows Freeware
Could it be problems with its merger with NetBSD & GNU/OpenBSD? I imagine that would take some time. Or are they going to have a few more releases separately?
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Because everyone is not you.
There are a lot of headless 'nix based gateway boxes around with a floppy, and no CD-ROM.
I love the "i dont need it so therefore noone possibly could" attitude slashbots have.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I would guess those situations don't involve threads or more than 1 CPU.
Sysinstall is functional, but it's kind of creaky as an installer IMHO. There's a bunch of functionality that seems to belong more inside of an installed and running system (such as a lot of the configuration bits) than in an installer.
If you're going to require all your installation tools to fit on a floppy, then an installer should have just the tools necessary to get the install files onto a system such that the system can be booted and then used. While it might be nice to have a bunch of post-install configuration options available, the technical constraints of boot media make this kind of prohibitive.
Perhaps one idea might be a meta-installer that installs the installation files onto the computer, and then reboots into a bigger environment where you can do more extensive system configuration and package management as well as providing a richer, more user-friendly tool. I hate to say this, but as annoyingly slow as Win2k's installer is, they use a very similar kind of bootstrap installation.
The other idea is to merge the two-stage install with a single stage install on a CD and just give up on the floppy.
I'm sure none of these ideas are terribly original, but they seem that way relative to sysinstall. I've only used FreeBSD over the past 3 years, so I have no idea what the Linux distros do. Do they do anything interesting with multistage installations?
In other words, 5.0 is not production-ready, although it is a complete release. It's still being actively debugged and stabilized in preperation for 5.1, which will probably be the first in the series that I'd put on a production server. The 4.x line is incredibly stable and still being actively maintained in the mean time.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
bzip may make smaller files, but takes more cpu power and more memory than gzip. That is why they don't change.
ah my dreams are foiled.. pf in a bsd distro that people "support"
Soon maybe
Whether or not you consider Office 2K stable is a point of view. From an admin point of view I find it rather irritaing that export from Great Plains to Excel only works if I give "Everybody" write access to the excel binary and the MAPI interface to Outlook is not only a moving target between patches because of bad security design, but as of SP3 randomly drops MAPI generated emails. So in this case "stable" really depends on what parts of it you use.
Does it cause blue screens of death or "crash" often? No. Does it behave as advertised all the time? Also no. That makes it "unstable" in my book.
Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and good with catsup.