Re: releng: how to follow NetBSD-6 STABLE branch

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 5/14/14, 5:22 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Almost. netbsd-6-1 is rooted at the place on netbsd-6 where the 6.1
> formal release is.  It gets only security fixes. netbsd-6 gets a
> larger category of fixes.
>
> The real question is the degree of safety of following a branch, in
> terms of getting good bugfixes and not getting problems.  The history
> of NetBSD stable branches for a very long time is that for a normal
> use computer (not a webserver for a bank, where you want a whole
> second copy and to do exhaustive testing before upgrading the real
> one), it's safe to update along netbsd-6, rebuild and reinstall, and
> reboot.  The odds of having to recover are very small.  If you're
> ultraconservative, then following netbsd-6-N (for the latest N) makes
> sense.  But most uses are well served by the main stable branch.

Hi, Greg.

(Sorry to reply to such an old post.)  I trust what you're saying about
the history of the NetBSD stable branches, but that doesn't seem to
match what I read on the NetBSD release glossary and graphs page:

  http://netbsd.org/releases/release-map.html

There it says the following about stable maintenance branches:

  What you will find on a stable branch is the last release (major
  or minor) plus whatever bug fixes and enhancements which will be
  going into the next minor release, pulled up from the NetBSD-current
  development branch. For example, if the latest release is 6.0, the CVS
  branch for it is "netbsd-6" which can be thought of as containing an
  alpha version of the following 6.x releases.

An "alpha version" does not sound stable to me. :-)  Maybe the wording
should be changed to not call it an "alpha" version, or maybe a more
clear statement about the stability of the stable branch (like your
statement above) should be added?

Thanks!

Lewis