suggest renaming and extending the -CURRENT and -STABLE lines

Hello people!

Before you all bang around on my head :-) hear me out on this one. It's
actually possible that someone has already made this suggestion and I
haven't found that thread yet. If so, please point me in the right
direction and I'll read up on it, before writing in this thread again.

In computer science and mathematics, we sometimes use terms from the
"normal" language but use them just a little differently than people
outside of our circle would. Sometimes that is unavoidable because our
language is just doesn't have enough words to express our thoughts - and
to express them exactly. This is usually not much of a problem. However,
sometimes we have to communicate with others, who may use our products and
ideas but don't embrace our language.

As the subject of this thread already suggests, I am referring to the
names of the developement branches, which I (even as a computer scientist)
consider a little "strange".

If someone sees the result of RELENG_6 is called STABLE, he or she will
problably think, this is the line where bug fixes are added, security
problems fixed and the whole thing is meant for production systems. While
the first two things may be true, I would not suggest RELENG_6 for
production systems. Normally the -STABLE line works fine. But I *have*
times in the past where a driver was changes and suddenly the system
*didn't* work after a reboot or showed strange behaviour.

What you could (and should?) use for a production system is RELENG_6_2. I
am using that, as you can see in the header. :-) Although the handbook
titles RELENG_6 as "staying stable...", people are warned not to use it on
production systems (which seems strange for something called "stable")
while RELENG_6_x isn't even mentioned.

What I propose is this:

When we have FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, we change these things a little.

- What is -CURRENT now stays -CURRENT (then probably 8-CURRENT).
- RELENG_7 is also called -CURRENT (7.x-CURRENT)
- RELENG_7_x could be called 7.x-RELEASE-px (see below)

Additionally, I suggest adding a new target. What we numbers we put at the
end of the RELENG_ isn't too important at the moment. This would be the
new -STABLE brach - and would deserve the name. It would point to the
current release and the newest patch. So basicly, if I started at
6.2-RELEASE, it would have brought me through all the patches of that
release and will update to 6.2-RELEASE once that is out and so on.

I realize that this is somewhat of a change and also that progress is
always frowned upon. :-) But IMHO it is a step in the right direction into
the right direction because it removes a word that can easily be
misunderstood - even by a user who isn't a complete beginner.

I'd like your thoughts about this and maybe we can work something out that
isn't exactly my idea but will work for the public.

Regards
Chris