Release Engineering

We are only 1 day to the great 6.0-STABLE code freeze, which will result in 7.0-CURRENT, 6.0-STABLE, and finally, 6.0-RELEASE!

Deploy FreeBSD on your spare boxes, g/f’s laptops, etc., to help us toward an excellent release!

Today, Colin has committed three security fixes that addresses three medium-risk security issues in FreeBSD kernel. That results in p11, p12 and p13 of FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, and has been committed to RELENG_5_4 as well so we will get that in the final release build.

Ken Smith has announced the tagging (with a mini heads-up in developers@), and then committed the naming (5.4-RELEASE) to the RELENG_5_4 tree. After that, RELENG_5_4 was tagged as RELENG_5_4_0_RELEASE, which is the last step of the release engineering that is related to the src/tree.

Please note that, this is not the final step of the final release. FreeBSD is very careful about the quality (not only as opposed to the kernel with colorful history of its security record, which is released under GPL and often release from time to time, haha, you know which is that) of a release, therefore, tagging does not mean that “we made it”, that is just a stage. Please be patient to wait for the PGP signed 5.4-RELEASE announcement BEFORE you download isos, even they were found on any sites.

It’s now consered as a legacy branch like RELENG_2_2 and RELENG_3. Future commits to RELENG_4 no longer needs re@’s approval, but only those committed to RELENG_4_11 (with re@’s approval, of course) will go to 4.11-RELEASE. 4.11-RELEASE will be the final 4-STABLE release and it will be a errata release.

Today Scott Long has named FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, this is a significant step toward final 5.3-RELEASE.

Please note that before the team has a PGP signed 5.3-RELEASE announcement, don’t download the ISOs even they have appeared on any site. We may still do changes after the naming.

Scott Long, the Release Engineering Team Lead, has announced the “Final MFC Call” which means we must MFC all changes in the next 24 hours. A Release Candidate would be tagged soon (in 1 day) by creating RELENG_5_3 branch.

Accroding to the historical release engineering practice, we will release at least two release candadites. However, the release engineering team thought that we have seven (7) beta releases and we may reduce the need of RC’s to only one.

As Scott Long clarified, 5.3’s RE will start on August 15. Alexenda Kabbev today announced the import of gcc 3.4.x snapshot will happen soon.

Big news. FreeBSD is calling for more developers to take attention on 5.3-RELEASE development, the 5.3-RELEASE, a.k.a. first 5-STABLE release, will begin its release engineering process in 4-6 weeks.

If you are using FreeBSD and willing to migrate to a 5.x branch release or 5-STABLE, it is highly recommended to use -CURRENT and report any problem you encounter. Also, you can help the development by checking out something on TODO list, or resolve some problem.

It seems that Bruce A. Mah is willing to take a break…

Scott Long has named 4.10-RELEASE yesterday and now the source tree has been tagged. The long awaited release has included the lastest FreeBSD -STABLE improvements, security updates, stablity improvements, and so on.

If everything goes ok, then FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE would be released by the end of this week. Now we are at RC3.