Talk:FreeBSD Release Branches

I ran across an interesting analogy on Questions today that may work its way into this article: Jerry McAllister wrote:

Yah, stable is better than alpha or the bleeding edge current
development image, but still in need of significant care.

Think of how they report someone's health condition after a trauma.
Stable seems to mean they can finally move the patient from the
operating room to a bed with monitors and walk down and get lunch.
But, the patient is still a long way from being able to drive home.

Just so, a FreeBSD version spends a long time in stable before
making it to RELEASE.

I'm not sure I like refering to FBSD as a trauma patient... but the analogy certainly makes the "STABLE IS NOT THE MOST STABLE RELEASE" memorable.

I may also want to explicitly mention that stable as a development release is in contrast to Debian, which is likely one of the mental stumbling blocks for many people with this concept. --Joe 12:00, 4 Jan 2006 (EST)