On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Greg MATTHEWS wrote:

> > On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Greg MATTHEWS wrote:
> >
> > > > Right.  Beta / Alpha kernels will produce unexpected results.
> > >
> > > > The reality is that even on big important production servers you'll want
> > > > to leave -release behind and upgrade a netbsd-1-[x] snapshot to get a
> > > > _LOT_ of important fixes, especially security fixes.

The _ALPHA snapshots in the "arch/<arch>/snapshot" directories are
just snaphots of the release branch built by a developer, on his own.
The only difference between that, and a release you (try to) build
yourself, is that the snapshot evidently built. From time to time,
release engineering will call for snapshots for all ports to a tag, in
which case they'll be a directory at the top level, alongside 1.4.3,
1.5, &c, but that hasn't happened lately.

> > > except NetBSD 1.5.3_ALPHA *is* the latest stable release of 1.5
> >
> > Actually, the latest on the netbsd-1-5 branch is now NetBSD 1.5.3_RC1
> > (for release candidate 1).

> i stand corrected... but even so, alpha and beta in this respect should be
> stable as they come from the -1-5 tree and contain bug fixes etc.... or did i
> get this wrong too?

Yes, that's the idea. Just like current, though, it's dynamic, so
there are still times when the tree doesn't even build -- one reason
it's not called "_STABLE". Folks have suggested "_ALPHA" isn't really
right either. The "_RCn" thing is new, and clearly intended to address
that confusion. We'll just have to wait to see what naming scheme
releng comes up with for pre-release-candidate netbsd-1-6.

Frederick