Am I missing something, or are they going to be working all weekend for the Sunday release? Anyways, I've been waiting for this one. Think I'll even order a DVD from the FreeBSD Mall

Although people will be working all weekend, you will not see a release on Sunday.

They have not even done RC1... and they may do more than one of those if an issue comes up. Patience, they are not going to release until it is stable. They are already a couple days behind the proposed times... look at the planned dates and the actual dates from that table. And it is going to be stable before a release gets made.

Huh? I thought they were up to RC5 already, or do they treat BETA RCs differently than RELEASE RCs (what would be the point of that, since RC = Release Candidate)?

Dunno, exactly, but they're @ beta 7 according to Distrowatch. We'll see, I guess.

Que? It says 23-25 October for the formal release... but yeah, it's a few days behind, isn't it?


Patience, it will be with us very soon.

lol, it is a common issue. Basically it works like this:

The stable tree is renamed BETA in preperation of a release. In this case the current tree was branched and renamed but the idea is the same. Several BETAs are worked on to get most of the bugs out. When the tree is very stable they rename BETA as RC1 and release that for extensive testing. If any problems are found they fix them and release RC2 and so on. When they are certain the product is very stable and bug free (as humanly possible) they branch the release.

The BETAs are not release canidates and unless someone is a willing to run an unstable system they are not recommended. They want a bunch of people using the release canidates so they can iron out the find issues but the BETA releases are meant to focus on the big bugs.

There should be no "showstopper" issues in an RC unless they manifest only after the RC has been made. BETA is pre-RC basically. The FreeBSD source tree confuses a lot of people... STABLE is actually unstable, BETA is more stable than STABLE, RC -- well most people have a handle on that one, RELEASE everyone thinks STABLE is more stable than a RELEASE but it is the opposite. It is enough to make someone



EDIT: We have not had any RC releases yet. You're probably thinking of the BETA iso images that are made available to testers.

Just so you know, they should be releasing RC1 any day now. Might even be before today is over.

If everything goes well then the release will follow shortly.

I see what happened, I got NetBSD 2.0 RCs mixed up with FreeBSD 5.3 BETAs.

Oh well, guess I'll have to wait a little while longer. Think I'll just place an order for the DVD and whenever it shows up, it shows up. It'll be nice to have the entire ports tree on DVD anyway... especially since I'm still using dialup.