[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

[Janos Dohanics]

On Sat, 16 May 2020 13:12:37 -0700
Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:

> > [...]
> 
> I started using FreeBSD somewhere between 2.5 and 2.7 and I remember
> the confusion of those "labels".  Yes the information is there, but
> it's not obvious to the new user.  I was running production systems
> and the name "stable" seemed like the right one.  However, the
> descriptions made me think that perhaps that was not the right
> choice.  I finally settled on "release" but it was quite a difficult
> decision.  After many discussions on this mailing list, I finally
> understood the differences.  I still find the names misleading, but I
> can work with them.  I do feel for anyone new to FreeBSD trying to
> figure that out.  It might be "obvious" to those who know, but it's
> not for others.
> 
> -- Doug

How stable is *-STABLE?

The closer it is to *-RELEASE perhaps?

In my limited experience (a few dozen instances) since about 4.3 or 4.4,
not once can I remember having to fall back to *-RELEASE.

This is not to challenege the expertise of people on this list or the
sound advice of the Handbook on which branch to use for what. May be I
have been just lucky doing end-user stuff (dhcp, cyrus, postfix, apache,
samba, etc.), but *-STABLE has been stable for me.

More likely, this reflects the quality of work FreeBSD developers have
been doing.

-- 
Janos Dohanics