Question: Is RC0 updated?

[dkrizic]

I am currently running

2.1-RC0 (i386)
built on Sun Jul 21 09:48:31 EDT 2013
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p8

It offers me to update every day. So is RC0 a branch or actually a tag? Does it make sense to update?

Regards,

Darko

[doktornotor]

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,47540.0.html
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,58437.0.html

[phil.davis]

Also:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,62711.0.html
The RC0 label is not a fixed release - it is an indication that the code has progressed towards release, but is still undergoing (hopefully) improvement. Commits to 2.1 can be viewed in Github:
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commits/RELENG_2_1

[zenny]

I update only when something breaks or there is security update, call me lazy ;-)

[dkrizic]

@phil.davis:

Also:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,62711.0.html
The RC0 label is not a fixed release - it is an indication that the code has progressed towards release, but is still undergoing (hopefully) improvement. Commits to 2.1 can be viewed in Github:
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commits/RELENG_2_1

Thank you, so it makes sense to update and to check if bugs are fixed. I was confused with the name, usually RC0, RC1 and so on are fixed RELEASES and intermediate versions are called RC1-SNAPSHOT.

Regards,

Darko

[podilarius]

Sorry but RC has always stood for Release Candidate. This means that all new feature development has halted and only bug fixes will be committed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Release_candidate

You can only get 2.1-RC1 from the snapshot server, so I would think that was self explanatory that they are snapshots. :P.

[jimp]

We roll snapshots labeled with a specific RC number more as a level (e.g. ALPHAx, BETAx, RCx). We used to do more formal "releases" but then people tended to get stuck on them and think they never needed to update to a -RELEASE.

So these days, we may occasionally roll one out formally, but most of the time the only "releases" are actually the -RELEASE images.

An RC snapshot could technically become -RELEASE if we wanted it to, though the version number would need updated and a new build performed, everything else would be the same.

Typically when it's time for that to happen we shut down access to the snapshots server for a while so people don't grab a -RELEASE image that isn't really the one, true, final -RELEASE if we find things that necessitate rolling a new set of images.