next release

Robert Watson
2004-02-13T17:29:47Z

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Sergey Matveychuk wrote:

> Where do you plan to release of 4.10 or 4.9.1?  There is not info on
> http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html

There are plans for at least one, and likely two, more releases on the
RELENG_4 branch.  And there could well be more if there is significant
demand.  However, a concrete schedule hasn't yet been laid down yet for
when the releases will occur -- presumably one sometime in the
spring/early summer, and then one sometime later in the year.  Version
numbers of not yet been selected, but I think "4.10" and
"4.11" are more
likely than "4.9.1".  Murray Stokely, who has been our 4.x release
engineer for the last few releases, is currently travelling, and as such
we haven't really hammered out the schedule.  We should put some words on
the release engineering page to declare general intent, however, since the
question comes up a lot.

> I've found some problems on my home box with 4.9 and when I've
upgraded
> to RELENG-4 they are gone. But I'm afraid to install not-release on my
> work boxes.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, there's an effect by which the
system sees much more broad exposure following a release (many people like
to install the release rather than the release candidates, needless to
say), and the result is that there will inevitably be fixes that trickle
in after the release as a result of problems not found in the test cycle.
In general, development in the -STABLE branch is pretty conservative right
now, and seems extremely stable, so it should be quite a safe update.  You
might want to try downloading the live CD (disc 2), booting it on your
system, and doing some tests.  That way you don't have to do an install to
check that all your hardware probes properly, etc.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research