New releases of FreeBSD are released from the -STABLE branch at approximately four month intervals. The FreeBSD release process begins to ramp up 45 days before the anticipated release date when the release engineer sends an email to the development mailing lists to remind developers that they only have 15 days to integrate new changes before the code freeze. During this time, many developers perform what have become known as “MFC sweeps”. MFC stands for “Merge From CURRENT” and it describes the process of merging a tested change from our -CURRENT development branch to our -STABLE branch.
Thirty days before the anticipated release, the source
repository enters a “code slush”. During this
time, all commits to the -STABLE branch must be approved by the
Release Engineering Team <re@FreeBSD.org>. The kinds of changes that are allowed during this 15 day
period include:
Bug fixes.
Documentation updates.
Security-related fixes of any kind.
Minor changes to device drivers, such as adding new Device IDs.
Any additional change that the release engineering team feels is justified, given the potential risk.
After the first 15 days of the code slush, a release candidate is released for widespread testing and the code enters a “code freeze” where it becomes much harder to justify new changes to the system unless a serious bug-fix or security issue is involved. During the code freeze, at least one release candidate is released per week, until the final release is ready. During the days leading to the final release, the release engineering team is in constant communication with the security-officer team, the documentation maintainers, and the port maintainers, to ensure that all of the different components required for a successful release are available.
When several release candidates have been made available for widespread testing and all major issues have been resolved, the final release “polishing” can begin.
Note:
In all examples below, $FSVN
refers to the location of the FreeBSD Subversion repository,
svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/.
The layout of FreeBSD branches in Subversion is
described in the Committer's Guide.
The first step in creating a branch is to
identify the revision of the
stable/ sources
that you want to branch from.X
# svn log -v $FSVN/stable/9The next step is to create the release branch
# svn cp $FSVN/stable/9@REVISION $FSVN/releng/9.2This branch can be checked out:
# svn co $FSVN/releng/9.2 srcNote:
Creating releng branch and release
tags are restricted to
Subversion administrators
and the Release Engineering Team.
Before the final release can be tagged, built, and released, the following files need to be modified to reflect the correct version of FreeBSD:
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors/chapter.xmldoc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.xmldoc/share/xml/freebsd.entsrc/Makefile.inc1src/UPDATINGsrc/gnu/usr.bin/groff/tmac/mdoc.localsrc/release/Makefilesrc/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/share/xml/release.dslsrc/release/doc/share/examples/Makefile.relnotesngsrc/release/doc/share/xml/release.entsrc/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfilesrc/sys/conf/newvers.shsrc/sys/sys/param.hsrc/usr.sbin/pkg_install/add/main.cwww/en/docs/man.xmlwww/en/cgi/ports.cgiports/Tools/scripts/release/config
The release notes and errata files also need to be adjusted for the new release (on the release branch) and truncated appropriately (on the stable/current branch):
src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/common/new.xmlsrc/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/errata/article.xml
Sysinstall should be updated to note
the number of available ports and the amount of disk space required
for the Ports Collection.
[6]
This information is currently kept in
src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/dist.c.
After the release has been built, a number of file should be updated to announce the release to the world.
doc/share/images/articles/releng/branches-relengX.picwww/share/xml/advisories.xmlwww/share/xml/includes.release.xmlwww/share/xml/includes.release.xslwww/en/releases/*www/en/releng/index.xmlwww/en/news/news.xmlwww/en/search/web.atozsrc/share/misc/bsd-family-tree