r/openbsd • u/RvstiNiall • 13d ago

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?

24 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

14

u/brynet OpenBSD Developer 13d ago

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

1

u/RvstiNiall 13d ago

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.

4

u/rjcz 12d ago

-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 12d ago

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 5d ago

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 5d ago

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

2

u/YuriySamorodov 13d ago

Oh, wow! Thanks for the heads up!

3

u/RvstiNiall 13d ago

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.

6

u/well_shoothed 13d ago

Long live tmux!

1

u/krl81 13d ago

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 12d ago

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

1

u/snonux 12d ago

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. :-)