Re: Ports and packages

+ Steve <SteveSpamTrap@xxxxxxxxx>:

| I understand what the RELEASE tag is. I suppose I am more
| murky on what STABLE and CURRENT mean.

CURRENT means what it says. It's the bleeding edge. Not to be
tracked lightly. Basically, as I have understood it, new stuff is put
in the CURRENT branch, then as bugs are weeded out and the code looks
solid, it is moved to STABLE. And from there it is just a hop, skip
and a jump into the next RELEASE.

| Are you saying that those tags apply only to base-OS compenents, and
| not to any ports?

I think that is what he was saying. Well, they also apply to binary
packages, which are not the same as ports. Ports after all are source
code, and ought to build on many different versions of the OS. But
packages, being binary, may depend on the libraries of a specific OS
version.

| Basically I would like to run a system that is fairly
| current, but not necessarily bleeding-edge (where my box is a guinea
| pig for the community), and I'm having a hard time figuring out
| accomplish this feat with FreeBSD.

YMMV as they say, but I have always just stayed with the lates RELEASE
and been quite content with that. I have even skipped one now and
then. Heck, the machine I write this on still runs 5.3! If you wish
to have access to the most urgent security and bug fixes, just track
RELENG_* instead.

(I skipped most of your other questions. I speak only as a (happy)
FreeBSD user, and most certainly not for the developers.)

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
.

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