When DragonFly hits release..

[Rahul Siddharthan]

"Erik P. Skaalerud" wrote:
>If we ever are going to have a branch similar to FreeBSD's "-STABLE", can we
>pleasepleaseplease not name it -STABLE?

This is in the FAQ: there will be no such branch.  Releases will be made
from the development branch.

>Over the years I've still wondered why its named -STABLE, when its not the
>most stable branch at all.

It is, unless you call the "patch" branches branches (they're
basically minor bugfixes to a release).

>I like debians way of expressing this, with "unstable".

Debian's "unstable" is quite different, because linux is a collection
of packages plus a kernel, and the question of stability only depends
on what packages conflict with one another.  So in fact, most packages
in Debian-unstable are individually stable versions (eg, they didn't
import KDE 3.2 until 3.2.1 was released); it's only the collection
that's not stable.  FreeBSD's -STABLE is meant to be mostly stable.
When I first started using FreeBSD (1999 or so), the handbook advised
people to track -STABLE for stability.  That advice had to be changed,
probably because -CURRENT outpaced -STABLE too much and therefore too
many MFC's became necessary, which affected stability.  Still, as a
casual user I never found much problem with FreeBSD-STABLE.

Rahul