The release branch for 1.5 was 6 months in length...During which time
real bugs did creep in and/or were found as side effects and had to get fixed.

This might work for X.Y.Z releases but the mainline releases even in good cases
take a while to cook and a new user coming in and supping -release would
be reasonably surprised to possibly get something labeled 1.6Alpha or something
similiar.

James

>
>On Tue, Dec 12, 2000 at 03:44:26PM -0500, jchacon@genuity.net wrote:
>> Plus, why would release indicate 1.5.1alpha? That isn't released and isn't
>> the current release yet.
>> 
>> -release would imply to me to be a copy of the last official release, not
>> the next in progress, possibly buggier working release candidate.
>
>Since minor version releases are patch releases - there should never be bugs
>introduced, because only bug fixes should be pulled up.
>(And possibly driver additions, which should never break existing code, just
>add new 'possibly-nonfunctional' code.)
>
>Any such pull-ups on 1.5 are what will become 1.5.1 someday anyway - since
>major changes -> on -current, will become 1.6
>
>So, supping -release is a way to automatically get security patches and
>bug fixes.
>
>(And no, I didn't understand that until Hubert explained it to me a year
>and a bit ago ;-)
>
>-- 
>David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Mastery of UNIX, like
>mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
>but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
>in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville 
>
>
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