FreeBSD Release Engineering

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http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-jan-2005-mar-2005.html

FreeBSD Release Engineering

URL: http://www.freebsd.org/releng

Contact: RE Team <re@freebsd.org>

FreeBSD 4.11, the final formal release of the 4.x series, was released on 25 Jan 2005. Many thanks to the all of the developers and users over the past 5 years who made it successful. While no more releases are planned, the security team will continue to support it through security update patches until 2007. Developers are also free to commit bug fixes and low-risk features to the RELENG_4 branch for the foreseeable future.

FreeBSD 5.4 is going through its final release candidate stages and is expected to be released in late April. Its focus is mostly bug fixes and minor feature and performance improvements, so it is an excellent target for those looking to upgrade from previous versions or to give FreeBSD a try for the first time. FreeBSD 5.5 will be release in about 4-6 months after 5.4.

FreeBSD 6.0 is rapidly approaching also. In contrast to FreeBSD 5.0, the goal is to take a more incremental approach to major changes, and not wait for years to get as many features in as possible. FreeBSD 6.0 will largely be an evolutionary change from the 5.x series, with the largest changes centered around multi-threading and streamlining the filesystem and device layers. Feature freeze and code freeze for 6.0 are coming up in May and June, and we hope to have 6.0 stable and ready for release in July or August.

The release engineering team has also started doing monthly informal snapshots of the 6-CURRENT and 5-STABLE trees. These are intended to increase the exposure of new features and get more users involved in testing and providing feedback. Snapshots can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/snapshots.