Stable vs Release difference?

I read your hint and FreeBSD guidence but it's exactly wrong name creation!
Is that better than that the name of STABLE replace with PRE_RELEASE?
In all of wikis the name of STABLE come with every development that was tested and fixed bugs and could be reliable.
Why FreeBSD behaves exceptional?
 
There are thousands of documents using the legacy "implied" syntax, and it would be maybe a waste of effort to revise those rather than, maybe making the distinction more prominent on the main web page or something. Even large clickable images:

"learn about FreeBSD Release " --for production ! And its newest features!
"learn about FreeBSD Stable " -- for home lab and coders !
"learn about FreeBSD Current" -- for developers !

Someone may have a better idea than that, of course...
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
"learn about FreeBSD Release " --for production ! And its newest features!
"learn about FreeBSD Stable " -- for home lab and coders !
"learn about FreeBSD Current" -- for developers !
Woww :q What is the meaning of stable?
jb_fvwm2 said:
Someone may have a better idea than that, of course...
My idea is replaceing STABLE with Pre_RELEASE that more than recognizable.
 
As Warren's document shows, the names assigned depend on the context and the person reading it. Stable may mean one thing to a user and another thing to a developer, as in your question. It's a matter of definition which is laid out in the documentation.
 
"STABLE" is not a version. It is a development branch for the currently versions that have a "stable" ABI. These are at the moment all the 10.x versions (minor versions of 10.x) and also those that will appear in future. A RELEASE is a fixed point on this STABLE branch which was sufficiently tested and really confirmed to work at this point at the time of a RELEASE.

There is also a CURRENT branch (sometimes called "HEAD"). On this branch the ABI can drastically change and it will be the next major version (at the moment it will be 11.0 which is on CURRENT development branch). On this branch there are no RELEASE points until it will change to STABLE. At the same time (or perhaps a bit earlier) the new CURRENT 12.x will be branched.

A normal user (that is not a developer) will not want STABLE (until he is really experienced and has good reasons to use it; at his own risk of course). Normal users choose the latest RELEASE. STABLE is for developers that improve the current product that will be the next RELEASE (most of this work are bug fixes and sometimes new features that don't break the userland and 3rd-party applications). CURRENT is for developers that develop a future product. On CURRENT things break very often and it is advisable to be a real expert, because everything bad may happen (expect to lose all data and even a total unusable system).

I tried to explain it short. Does this help?
 
Thanks for All Right Answer!
But its dialectics is exactly wrong!
A new person who passed Engineer Software Courses at universities while hear the word of STABLE Operating System, He think that it is final reliable release and nothing else. :stud
But if replace the word of STABLE with another recognizable word such as LAB, CODER, PreRelease, ... it was so illustrative.
It's only my idea and if anyone don't accept my idea, I respect them.
 
One main advantage of FreeBSD against Linux is the long term direction of things. It has a long time history of dividing to CURRENT, STABLE and RELEASE. Everyone who use FreeBSD knows it, and every document does describe it clearly. Changing STABLE to PRE_RELASE or something else will make some confusion to the current users and needs many useless work to change all documentations. Even Software Engineers should read the revision descriptions of operating systems they use.
 
I know I'm late to the party, but oh well...

What I fail to understand here is that the OP refers to a PC-BSD page while this forum deals with FreeBSD. No offense, but that's apples and oranges in my opinion.

On FreeBSD the best source of release information, in my opinion of course, would be the releases page.

And as you can see they use different and easy to understand descriptions there: production release and legacy release. Of course, now that I look at that page myself, there's something else which is kind of odd: while the main section describes versions 8.4 and 9.3 as legacy the left hand menu calls both production as well.

Another good source of information is the list of supported FreeBSD releases. You can clearly see that stable releases have no mentioned release date and that their (expected) EOL matches that of the last release. It also shows under version 10.0 (at the time of writing).

So stable really does mean stable, but the main difference is that it's not a single release, as has been said above as well.
 
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