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2 Release Process

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.

2.1 Code Review

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 . The kinds of changes that are allowed during this 15 day period include:

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.

2.2 Final Release Checklist

When several release candidates have been made available for widespread testing and all major issues have been resolved, the final release “polishing” can begin.

2.2.1 Creating the Release Branch

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/X sources that you want to branch from.

# svn log -v $FSVN/stable/9

The next step is to create the release branch

# svn cp $FSVN/stable/9@REVISION $FSVN/releng/9.2

This branch can be checked out:

# svn co $FSVN/releng/9.2 src

Note: Creating releng branch and release tags are restricted to Subversion administrators and the Release Engineering Team.

2.2.2 Bumping up the Version Number

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.xml

  • doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.xml

  • doc/share/xml/freebsd.ent

  • src/Makefile.inc1

  • src/UPDATING

  • src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/tmac/mdoc.local

  • src/release/Makefile

  • src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/share/xml/release.dsl

  • src/release/doc/share/examples/Makefile.relnotesng

  • src/release/doc/share/xml/release.ent

  • src/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile

  • src/sys/conf/newvers.sh

  • src/sys/sys/param.h

  • src/usr.sbin/pkg_install/add/main.c

  • www/en/docs/man.xml

  • www/en/cgi/ports.cgi

  • ports/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.xml

  • src/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. [1] 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.pic

  • www/share/xml/advisories.xml

  • www/share/xml/includes.release.xml

  • www/share/xml/includes.release.xsl

  • www/en/releases/*

  • www/en/releng/index.xml

  • www/en/news/news.xml

  • www/en/search/web.atoz

  • src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree

2.2.3 Creating the Release Tag

When the final release is ready, the following command will create the release/9.2.0 tag.

# svn cp $FSVN/releng/9.2 $FSVN/release/9.2.0

The Documentation and Ports managers are responsible for tagging their respective trees with the tags/RELEASE_9_2_0 tag.

When the Subversion svn cp command is used to create a release tag, this identifies the source at a specific point in time. By creating tags, we ensure that future release builders will always be able to use the exact same source we used to create the official FreeBSD Project releases.

Notes

[1]

FreeBSD Ports Collection http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports
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