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[Forum] Matt Dillon's Dragonfly pre-releaseANN.lu
Posted on 02-Jul-2004 09:17 GMT by Elwood10 comments
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Some of you probably remember Matt Dillon. He released DragonFly, an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. Read everything here
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Comment 1Anonymous02-Jul-2004 09:35 GMT
Comment 2Joe "Floid" Kanowitz02-Jul-2004 12:56 GMT
Comment 3Darth_XRegistered user02-Jul-2004 14:29 GMT
Comment 4sutro02-Jul-2004 14:54 GMT
Comment 5Kolbjørn Barmen02-Jul-2004 15:08 GMT
Comment 6Elwood02-Jul-2004 17:21 GMT
Comment 7Oliver B. Warzecha03-Jul-2004 07:29 GMT
Comment 8Anonymous04-Jul-2004 16:50 GMT
Matt Dillon's Dragonfly pre-release : Comment 9 of 10ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 04-Jul-2004 22:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
excuse me, this is VERY old. why are we mentioning DragonFlyBSD months after it was first rpereleased??

Because this is 1.0 (or a RC thereof; actually, RC2 just came out), the first version the project will guarantee "normal humans" some stability with.

Again, since it was pretty smooth sailing (except for a few data-loss bugs, a few crashes, a few days when the tree might not build at all, and a few drastic architectural changes) from founding to 'release,' a long-time BSD user will ask "What's the big deal?" ... To which an Amiga or Windows or binary-only Linux user will respond, isolated from the realities of software development, "There are days when your operating system won't compile?!"

Think of the HEAD of the tree as an internal 'alpha.' "Release Candidates" (not unlike the OS4 Developer's Preview) are effectively 'betas' (though it's fair to say the DP isn't a beta, it's a... erm, "Preview," composed only of components that tested stable in beta... a conservative practice when Apple was selling untested code), in the sense that the developers trust them not to set anyone's printers on fire. In DragonFly CVS, the development process on that 'tag' is then frozen except for fixes to issues uncovered in the candidates. New work can continue to pile up on the HEAD of the tree, as this article might explain.

(The tag-vs.-branch thing is pretty esoteric, and doing it this way is just a convenience that fits with the development model... DragonFly won't be 'forking' itself with each release, so fixes can be 'captured' in a new tag -- the WINDOWS_98 tag might equal the WINDOWS_95 tag but for a new version of EXPLORER.EXE ;) -- without doing explicit copies and so on. FreeBSD, on the other hand, rarely expects new commits to work cleanly with old versions, so they branch to keep things clean as files are deleted or moved around; RELENG_5 doesn't need to preserve memory that some file once existed in 2.x, while it'll still be archived in the RELENG_2 branch if you need it. None of this *directly* relates to the need for 'code freezes,' either; it's only that DragonFly is smaller and more focused, so it's easy for Matt to know what's going on in his HEAD... and not wake up one morning to discover he's grown three complete threading libraries* and a rash of regressions.)

Anyway, to get the real truth of the matter, you can read this as "DragonFly has gone into what a commercial project would call 'final beta.' You can expect 1.0 by the end of the month, which the developers, for calling it '1.0,' will then consent to try to give you support on if you use it in a 'production environment.'"

In DragonFly's case, 1.0 should also have been the first 'snapshot' of the API and ABI, as plans for backwards-compatibility are concerned; however, same seems to have been pushed off to 2.0... Making this, again, sort of the 'special case, get people to run it' release, but certainly no worse than FreeBSD for it.

---

*Yes, some guys would kill to have three, but do any of them stay up when working with GIMPs or giant lizards?
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