As discussed at BSDCon, the release engineers are committed to releasing a relatively stable snapshot of FreeBSD -CURRENT on or around April 1, 2002. Obviously, a lot of major components are still in progress, but a great deal of work has already been accomplished, and could benefit from the additional exposure that a polished snapshot with full package set and documentation will provide.
To this end, we would like to request that commits for the next 7 days to HEAD be made with special care. -CURRENT is in pretty good shape right now, so we're not requiring approval for all commits. However, we do request that re@ be consulted for any commits with a substantial risk. This includes non-trivial changes to the VM system, filesystems, network stack, important userland components, and others. If unsure about a commit, please ask. Changes specific to emerging architectures (sparc64, ia64, powerpc) are exempt from this approval requirement no matter how substantial the change (as long as it only affects the given architecture). On March 15, a RELENG_5_0_DP1 branch will be created in CVS for final release polishing. This will allow us to provide translated release notes, sync up sysinstall and the package set, bump version numbers, and tweak default diagnostic settings without further impacting -CURRENT developers. Commits to this branch will require re@ approval. For further information about our plans for 5.0 Developer Previews, and the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0 in November, please see the new release engineering section of the FreeBSD web site : http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng If you would like to help out with some of the quality-assurance work for the upcoming developer preview, please install a -CURRENT snapshot from : ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i386 - or - ftp://snapshots.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/i386 And post your findings to current@ or qa@. (Sorry, Alpha -CURRENT snapshots are harder to come by at the moment, but Compaq just donated some hardware to alleviate this problem in the future.) Thanks for your cooperation, - Murray (on behalf of The Release Engineering Team)
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