[Bug 265594] It’s hard to know what v ersion of FreeBSD you are running (primarily a documentation issue)

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=265594

            Bug ID: 265594
           Summary: It’s hard to know what version of FreeBSD you are
                    running (primarily a documentation issue)
           Product: Base System
           Version: CURRENT
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Many People
          Priority: ---
         Component: misc
          Assignee: bugs@FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: rwatson@FreeBSD.org

End users often want to know what version of FreeBSD they are running. But
understanding what version is being used is quite hard once you’ve used
freebsd-update, as the documentation and tooling is inconsistent and/or has
gaps:

 - The uname(1) man page represents that the “-r” argument will "Write the
current release level of the operating system to standard output.”.  However,
that is actually the value of the OS version returned by kern.osrelease, which
may not be the version you have installed via freebsd-update.

- The freebsd-version(1) command will tell you the version you have installed.
But it is not cross-referenced from uname(1), even thought freebsd-version(1)
cross references uname(1).

- The freebsd-update(8) command has no way to print the current version --
e.g., “status” or “version” that I can find, and it would be the most obvious
place to look to find out the installed version. It cross references neither
uname(1) nor freebsd-version(1).

Obviously, the notion of “version” is complex, but some effort has been gone to
to neatly hide the complexity of that idea in the freebsd-version(1) command.
It seems like it would be good to:

1. Make sure freebsd-version(1) is well cross referenced from other tools that
relate to OS version (e.g., uname(1), freebsd-update(8)).

2. To make that version information easy to get via update management tools,
such as freebsd-update(8), which might ideally wrap freebsd-version(1) to
provide a “version” or “status” mode.

3. To slightly clarify in uname(1) that “-r” is not exactly the “current
release level” as most users would imagine such a term to mean.

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