*BSD News Article 72273


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD 2.1.1 support Cyrix 6x86??Etc...
Date: 27 Jun 1996 20:26:17 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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le@put.com (Louis Epstein) wrote:

> Hmm,I thought 2.1 was supposed to be the bugfix release of 2.0.5?
> (But 2.0.5 was a bugfix release of 2.0,no?)

Hmm.  Not quite exactly.

2.0R was something that could only be considered `beta', given the
entirely new codebase after moving to 4.4BSD-Lite.

2.1 was _supposed_ to be the next release, but with the requirement
that it had to get at least as stable as the famous 1.1.5.1 release.
With the time passing, the wishlist for 2.1 was never ending, and in
order to stop users from buying the (known to be rather buggy) 2.0
CDs, 2.0.5 has been prepared.  By this time, the branch we now call
"-stable" has been split off, and the head of the CVS tree was called
2.2-development.  Only selected bugfixes went into the branch (causing
the release engineers a huge amount of work), finally forming
something that was good enough to call it 2.1R.

Now that the branch has been there, it was decided to be a good idea
continuing to move over bug fixes from the head into it, so -stable
was continued.  It's unlikely whether this experiment will be
repeated, since we feel that we don't have the (personal) resources to
maintain two largely diverging source branches.  But now that we've
done it, the final result will be published as 2.1.5.

> Will there ever be a FreeBSD-really_stable?

Depends from your point of view. :)  As you know, there's no such thing
like "100 % bug-free software".  So, there's always one more bug...
OTOH, i'm even running (selected) -current snapshots on production
machines at work, and they behave fairly well.  Of course, to do this,
one should be rather familar with the actual development, and not
doing any upgrade in times when there are major changes happening to
the source tree.  However, having the CVS tree mirrored everywhere
around the world allows for a rather fine local source tree
management, and with CPU speeds growing ever faster, recompiling major
parts of the system is something one can do now while having a cup of
tea... ;-)

-- 
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. ;-)