On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 04:17:56PM +0700, John Indra wrote:
> Hi...
> 
> Can someone shed some light on me. I am a total NetBSD newbie. Now I am
> downloading NetBSD -CURRENT snapshot and while waiting for it to finish, I
> have been doing quite some reading.

More reading:
http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/release-map.html

> In FreeBSD world, there are 2 branches: -STABLE and -CURRENT. After some
> time decided by release engineering team, a snapshot of -STABLE is published
> as -RELEASE. That's it...

NetBSD has -current and the equivalent of -STABLE.  Under NetBSD the -STABLE
is referred to as the "release branch" and via CVS you would ask for the
tag 'netbsd-1-5' to get the NetBSD 1.5.x release branch.  So this branch is
equivalent to FreeBSD's 4.x-STABLE branch.

> I have been reading from archieves. I saw the word -current, I saw the word
> mainline, I saw the word branch for i386 (something to do with MP)???

Mainline would be the main trunk of the CVS repository as far as I know.
This is -current.  So at some point in the development process the main 
trunk is considered feature complete for a release, so a separate branch
is created for the new release.  Currently work is progressing nicely on
-current, and at some point in the future 1.6 will be branched.  Then
there will be a lot of testing, bug fixing, and other cleanup tasks done
to the new netbsd-1-6 branch.  No major new features will be added to
the 1.6 branch during this time.
Note that based on the projected features for 1.6, it may not be branched
for quite some time.  SMP is one critical feature for 1.6 AFAIK.

Regarding the i386 MP branch, this is basically a way for the developers
to work on bleeding edge / unstable code with the -current codebase,
without destabilizing the -current kernel for everyone else.   This is
quite a bit more work for the developers, having to synchronize the 
branch with -current frequently. (and we thank them for their work!)

-Andrew