Subject: NetBSD branches and upcoming changes
To: None <netbsd-announce@netbsd.org>
From: James Chacon <jmc@netbsd.org>
List: netbsd-announce
Date: 01/13/2005 00:08:04
Moving forward releases for NetBSD are planned to continue in their
current fashion but also have the addition of a new branch tracking each
release that is designated for security/critical fixes only. This will allow
users who are tracking a given release to be able to update for critical
fixes without also having to update and/or merge other fixes that may be
applied to a release branch as part of it's ongoing maintainence.

As such, the branch naming scheme will be: (with a special note for 2.0)

CVS branch names:

   Branch leading
   up to     branch tag     release tag            branch from
   
   2.0       netbsd-2-0     netbsd-2-0-RELEASE     HEAD
   2.1       netbsd-2       netbsd-2-1-RELEASE     netbsd-2-0-RELEASE
   2.2       netbsd-2       netbsd-2-2-RELEASE     (no new branch)   
   2.0.1     netbsd-2-0     netbsd-2-0-1-RELEASE   (no new branch)   
   M.0       netbsd-M       netbsd-M-0-RELEASE     HEAD
   M.0.p     netbsd-M-0     netbsd-M-0-p-RELEASE   netbsd-M-0-RELEASE
   M.m       netbsd-M       netbsd-M-m-RELEASE     (no new branch)   
   M.m.p     netbsd-M-m     netbsd-M-m-p-RELEASE   netbsd-M-m-RELEASE
   M.m.p+1   netbsd-M-m     netbsd-M-m-p+1-RELEASE (no new branch)   

NOTE: NetBSD 2.0 started with a different branch name (netbsd-2-0) as it
was originally following the historical naming scheme before the new branches
were added.

What this means is anyone tracking NetBSD 2.0 today on the branch who wants
to track all changes going into 2.1 should update their cvs tree's with
the following:

cvs -q up -dPA -rnetbsd-2

The current branch (netbsd-2-0) will continue to exist and eventually will
be the basis for the 2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc releases if/when those occur. As it's
designed to be used for generating these point releases only it's strongly
recommended that users track against the specific release tags on these
branches (ala netbsd-2-0-1-RELEASE once that occurs for instance).

James