On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 22:30 -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > I sincerely do not know where "BETA2" (not "BETA-2") comes from. It's > not defined anywhere in src/sys/conf/newvers.sh in CVS: > > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh > > To me, this means someone is hand-hacking the file before making ISO > releases. The problem with this is there's no way to correlate what CVS > tag said string is based on; I have to assume it's RELENG_7. > > CC'ing Ken, who can probably explain where "BETA2" comes from, since I > believe he's the one who makes the builds.
Release builds are done using whats in /usr/src/release. One of the
things you can set on the command line when you run make(1) there is the
BUILDNAME variable, for example "BUILDNAME=7.1-BETA2" in this case. The
result of doing that is to change src/sys/conf/newvers.sh inside the
build environment (which is among other things a checked out source
tree) before doing the build.
We use BUILDNAME for the Monthly Snapshots as well, that's why
src/sys/conf/newvers.sh doesn't need to be altered just for those
builds.
> <opinion>
> I really wish we'd name our not-yet-RELEASE-or-STABLE ISO releases as
> FreeBSD x.y-PRERELEASE-YYYYMMDD, which would make more sense to users.
> </opinion>
What to have in src/sys/conf/newvers.sh before we do the branch for the
release (typically the BETA builds, we usually do the branch for the
release at the point we shift over to Release Candidates (RCs)) is
unfortunately something we can't win with no matter what we do. The
truth is that branches like RELENG_7 are development branches. We try
very hard to never break things (well, badly anyway... :-) in those
branches once they're considered to be a "stable branch". But from time
to time things do get broken there. If we were a corporation RELENG_7
type branches wouldn't be available to the public - they would be a
"tool" for the staff programmers to work in. Its the RELENG_7_0 type
branches that would be considered suitable for our customers.
But we're not a corporation, and we don't want to keep stuff "private".
The downside to that however is people who are sort-of involved in the
FreeBSD community but aren't truly active participants see RELENG_7
called "stable" and figure its OK to run their systems on that. We tell
them not to, or at least to be sure to read mailing lists like
freebsd-stable@ if they're going to do that, but lots of people don't
follow that advice. And someone in that situation *really* freaks out
if they update a system and winds up with a system that calls itself
something too strange. It was a lot worse the last couple times we
tried calling a "stable branch" something that had the word BETA in it,
and we've more or less settled on PRERELEASE with no other fiddling as a
way to suggest "something is going on" but not freak out that set of
people too much...
We do bump src/sys/conf/newvers.sh in the release branches once they get
created (so it will become 7.1-RC1 at the point we create RELENG_7_1).
But for the BETAs the best you can do to be a bit more descriptive of
when you had done a source-based update is just note the date you did
the update.
--
Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
there, funny things are everywhere. |
- Theodore Geisel |
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