Package status meanings
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What is the order of package status? Most are obvious except for Release, Test, and Experimental, and Final. Others might find the answers to this information useful enough to put it on the pfsense document site under the package section.
Most stable to least stable…
1. Stable
2. Beta
3. AlphaI noticed that all the versions of haproxy (haproxy, haproxy-full, and haproxy-devel) all have Release as their status. Just what does that mean?
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Someone really needs to go through and update all of those, as the current labels are largely meaningless as many of them haven't been touched in years even though the packages have been working great.
Typically "Release" and "Stable" mean that it's tested, works well, and not likely to break.
"Beta" is generally also fairly good quality but may have some rough edges.
"Alpha", "Test", and "Experimental" are roughly the same, meaning they are under development and may work, but probably won't.
"Final" is a bit more ambiguous. On the one hand it means it is stable, but it also implies no future updates will be made to the package.
That's what they should mean, at least. Currently it's rather impossible to tell the actual real-world quality of a package by such labels since they haven't been maintained.
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Thanks for the info.
The thing that really confused me is that haproxy-devel is Release status which should mean Stable and yet doing searches on it seems to indicate features can change on that version. This is the main reason I brought this up is so that I can understand how a devel version of something is in a Release status.
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For HAproxy, the "-devel" variety is probably more like Beta.
The "-full" variety needs to go away, but some people still rely on it. Its status should really be "Deprecated" or "Retired".
