As the FreeBSD 5.2.1 approaching its release day, I begun to think about the possiblity of having a personal customized release.

It’s not too hard for me, and also valuable because the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has restricted the changes in a point release to be mainly “critical bugfixes only”.

For FreeBSD, this is very important, and hence we saw every release more successful than before. However, on the other hand, several “non-critical” improvements are important to me, while the instablity on -CURRENT is not acceptable.

To solve this problem, I’ll have to have a customized branch. My plan is to base this on 5.2.1-RELEASE and manually merge some -CURRENT code on it. Personally I believe that these changes are important for the merge:

　　o Make KSE default.
　　o Make ULE default.
　　o Recent driver updates.
　　o Recent ACPI commits.
　　o Recent VM fixes.
　　o Almost all userland changes in -CURRENT.
　　o All documentation improvements.
　　o junsu’s PID patch. (some minor comestic changes will took place)

I am not an experienced release engineer on a project having several millions lines of code, but I think it’s worthy to have a try.

This is intend to be a pre-5-STABLE branch. I’m not concerned about the back out of KSE now so it would not be so hard to maintain it.

The version control system is a difficult problem*. I am now very familiar with CVS, and it seems that p4 has many advantages over cvs, it’s faster, and more powerful when handling branches.

* junsu has suggested me to use p4 instead of cvs. Attractive idea.