Release or Snapshot for Mission-Critical System

[Jason Hinze]

Hello,

I'm new to RTEMS and I'm trying to get a feel for the community's
consensus on which version of RTEMS to use for mission-critical
development.  I've poked around the ftp site, and perused the
'RTEMS Users' and 'RTEMS Snapshots' mailing lists, and I can't
get a good idea of what the accepted best practice is.

As far as I can tell, 4.5.0 is the latest full release; but it seems to
be 2 - 2.5 years old.  I see quite a bit of discussion that seems to
indicate that people are happily using snapshots, but it also seems
that they do encounter a fair number of early-adopter issues.

For the system we will be developing, stability is paramount.
I'll gladly give up on features, tidiness, and such, for a proven-
stable foundation.  Once our system has been deployed, it
will be somewhere between extremely difficult and completely
impossible to fix any software issues.

So, what do y'all think?  Do we use 4.5.0, the latest snapshot,
or some known-by-many-to-be-good snapshot?

Also, if we use 4.5.0 or a non-current snapshot, do we want
to use the versions of the GNU tools that were originally
associated with that release / snapshot of RTEMS, or the
latest versions of the GNU tools?

Thanks for your help,
Jason Hinze
jjh at cosmicflow.com