Development and Release Process
Development is continuous, and team management is open and tiered. Anyone with appropriate skills may contribute, with commit rights being awarded on merit and de Raadt acting as coordinator. Two official releases are made per year, with the version number incremented by 0.1, and these are each supported for twelve months. Snapshot releases are also available at very frequent intervals. Maintenance patches for supported releases may be applied manually or by regularly updating the system against the patch branch of the CVS repository for that release.
Alternatively a system administrator may opt to upgrade using a snapshot release and then regularly update the system against the "current" branch of the CVS repository, in order to gain pre-release access to recently added features.
The standard GENERIC OpenBSD kernel, as maintained by the project, is strongly recommended for universal use, and customized kernels are not supported by the project, in line with the philosophy that 'attempts to customize or "optimize" the kernel causes more problems than they solve.'
Packages outside the main system build are maintained by CVS through a ports tree and are the responsibility of the individual maintainers (known as porters). As well as keeping the current branch up to date, the porter of a package is expected to apply appropriate bug-fixes and maintenance fixes to branches of the package for supported releases. Ports are not subject to the same continuous rigorous auditing as the main system because the project lacks the manpower to do this.
Binary packages are built centrally from the ports tree for each architecture. This process is applied for the current version, for each supported release, and for each snapshot. Administrators are recommended to use the package mechanism rather than build the package from the ports tree, unless they need to perform their own source changes.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“Rules and particular inferences alike are justified by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. The process of justification is the delicate one of making mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences; and in the agreement achieved lies the only justification needed for either.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)