The hope is that with more frequent releases the upgrade path between minor releases will be smoother -- often in the past we've had breakage due to developers saying "I really need to get this into the tree now because otherwise I'll need to wait over a year for the next release". At some point we might change terminology to say e.g. "FreeBSD 17 update 3" rather than "FreeBSD 17.3" -- I've been saying for long time that we should think about minor updates as service packs rather than full releases.
It should be said this is mostly fine-tuning. freebsd-update is ok mostly, sure from time to time I find the CVS <<< >>> notation confusing, but thats a pretty small price to pay for something which JUST WORKS.
the disconnect between FreeBSD versions and the state of portsnap sometimes is in some ways more confusing. "sorry, you can't use ports anymore, we decided you're too old, but if you set WE_WARNED_YOU_THIS_MAY_NOT_WORK=1 it may be ok" -I don't seem able to predict when this is coming down the pipe. I am lazy and mostly live in the prebuilt binary pkg anyway so again, this is whining.
Thank you for the care taken with this thing. It's awesome.
