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Well, Thank u (to both of u) for the anwsers. But, I was looking for a more concrete answer...
I had check the release announcement before, and I have done it again and something else too.
"The FreeBSD 5.5 Release is being done for people
who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time"
Maybe it is obvious for an BSD xpert, but not for me...
What would make someone "unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time" There must be something powerful enough to make the developpers pursuing the development with 2 branches... but what would be the cases ?????
I mean, you do not see that frecuently in other distros (BSD or Linux ...)
The developpers just release a new version and people update or not... but you don't get a new branch of development with every release... If not there wolud be infinite development of branches (one for every release of every distro...)
So, I just want to understand the reasons for which the old 5x release has produced a parallel branch of develpopment. Incompatibility of the 6x branch with some other paramount software (database... or whatever?), maybe ... ??? But what important cases/examples would impeade anyone from updating to the 6x branch ???
Thanks , Angel
The 5 branches has its own packages, too.
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386
Suppose someone has a production server running 5.4 or 5-stable.
Upgrading to 6 means upgrading all the packages installed too.
Even if some packages uses the same release on both branches.
Suppose that apache is 1.3.99 for 5.x and 6.x both.
There exists different packages built for 5.x and 6.x even if the version of apache is the same.
Well upgrading to 6.x it doesn't mean that you can use the 1.3.x package for 5.x with 6.x you need to reinstall it.
The migration to 5.x and 6.x is not only a matter of upgrading binaries.
Check this:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/6.0-RELEASE/INSTAL...
I'm not a tech so my answer could not be accurate.
Edited 2006-02-22 08:06





Member since:
2005-06-29
The answers are in this article if you click on a link.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-February/01...
The FreeBSD 5.5 Release is being done for people who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time. We do encourage people to make that transition as soon as possible, though. There have been some updates made between FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 5.5 but not all of the bugfixes done to RELENG_6 have been backported to RELENG_5. This will almost certainly be the last 5.X release.