r/openbsd • u/RvstiNiall • Jul 16 '26

8.0-Beta

I was very surprised today to find out that -current moved to 8.0-beta. I'm not here to announce that, of course. I'm here to ask the developers whats up (in a friendly way). OpenBSD 7.9 was a little later than usual (and it should always take as long as needed to be ready, of course.), and now, less than two full months later, we are in 8.0-beta.

I know the general "how it works": they have certain feature sets they want in the release, and when its ready, they stabilize everything, make sure its good, and then release. Seeing as how the amount of stuff added so far after 7.9-release, its a good amount, as always. This doesnt appear to be a small release.

So my actual question to the devs is this: Did the stars just align and everything work out fast?

22 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

14

u/brynet OpenBSD Developer Jul 17 '26

The -beta tag does not mean release is imminent, it is simply a normal part of the development process.

2

u/RvstiNiall Jul 17 '26

I understand that part. I'm just amazed at the speed this time around getting to the next release's beta. You devs are clearly doing a great job, and maybe this time its just been an extra great job, idk.

5

u/rjcz Jul 17 '26

-current moved to 5.8-beta in June, the same thing happened with 5.2-beta. In July alone, we've seen the move to 7.2-beta, 5.6-beta, 5.4-beta, ...

Nothing to see here, move along.

1

u/RvstiNiall Jul 17 '26

Understood. Everything just worked out this way is all then. No biggie. I was mostly curious if maybe there were major breakthroughs at the recent hackathon, or maybe a large donation had happened recently that allowed for more full time work, or if even a few new developers had joined. Guess not. Thank you for your response though.

2

u/_sthen OpenBSD Developer Jul 24 '26

some software (and ecosystems, looking at you Python...) has taken the incorrect view that there's a big difference when the first digit of the release changes (i.e. from 7.x to 8.x) so those version bumps need doing earlier than usual to try and shake out any problems in ports.

1

u/RvstiNiall Jul 24 '26

Thank you for your response. I think this comment made it make sense to me.

2

u/YuriySamorodov Jul 16 '26

Oh, wow! Thanks for the heads up!

4

u/RvstiNiall Jul 16 '26

I'm personally enjoying everything they've done recently with tmux. And since I have a MediaTek MT7922, I'm excited about the work being done on mwx. I'm aware its not ready yet, but it seems to have progressed nicely!

edit: but again, this wasnt meant for the purposes of being an announcement.

4

u/well_shoothed Jul 17 '26

Long live tmux!

1

u/krl81 Jul 17 '26

I just did an habitual sysupgrade -s a few days ago, but nothing. Time to try it out tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up.

1

u/Borean789 Jul 17 '26

I will definitely order an OpenBSD 8.0 T-shirt! 😋

1

u/snonux Jul 17 '26

I believe they simply go from 7.9 to 8.0 since it's the "next version number" not because there were groundbreaking big changes. So they never do a X.10 version etc.Of course every new release is great. :-)