Ahhh... well... in my 8 years of being around FreeBSD when we enter the -BETA phase on the -STABLE branch the tree goes to hell in a hand basket for about 2 weeks. So please don't make the handbook state the above. Perhaps more like:

Every few months in preperation for the next -RELEASE from the -STABLE branch the system will call itself -BETA, this is to reflect the fact that lots of changes are occuring in the tree, mainly merges of well tested code from the developers branch (-CURRENT). The tag -BETA is used to denoate that these events are occuring and you may enconter minor problems. This is not like a -BETA product from most software companies, as the code being brought in has general had a rather extensive test period, but the project has no way to test all code in all situations and breakage is bound to happen.

Though many have called this a bikeshed, and at times I have agreed that a lot of what is being said is a bikeshed (names are names, people who attatch permanent fixed meaning to names are going to have problems understanding lots of things, the -STABLE, -RELEASE, -BETA, -CURRENT tags being one of them.) But I have seen 2 things come up in this last round of this 8 year old thread that could actually use some fixing:

a) Rename the standard-supfile, that one in itself has caused a lot of grief and is a trivial change with minimal impact to the masses as it really should only be used by -developers, who know how to deal with all this.

b) Correct everyone who says ``FreeBSD -BETA is really just as stable as the normal -STABLE. It is not! During this phase of a branch things get borked all over the place, from not being able to build the tree due to partial MFC's or botched commits, to kernels that crash and burn due to subtle bugs and corner cases that didn't get tested in -CURRENT due to the smaller user base and narrower scope of hardware being tested on.

One way to correct this would be to actually branch for -BETA, then once the group of us -STABLE users who actually have a clue about how to build and test this stuff have had a fair chance (2 weeks?) to pound it a bit merge it back into -STABLE in one big sweep and call it -RC. This is a short lived branch, but may have a rather high impact on cvsup resources due to the tagging operations required to do this type of operation cleanly.

The masses would never see -BETA, but it would be done by people who actually know how to be beta testers :-)