Re: Proposal: Improve BE naming convention in freebsd-update install

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I think there was a misunderstanding about the core of my proposal. I 
was not suggesting a naming convention for users to follow manually. The 
proposal is that freebsd-update itself should automatically rename the 
current BE to "HEAD" after each install operation.

To be more explicit:

  * When freebsd-update install completes, it renames the current BE to
    "HEAD" automatically.
  * The next time freebsd-update install runs, it again renames the
    current BE to "HEAD", overwriting the previous name.
  * This guarantees that "HEAD" always refers to the latest state
    managed by freebsd-update, without any user intervention.

This addresses your concern about name shifting. The shifting is done by 
freebsd-update itself, not by the user.

Regarding your point that "HEAD" does not describe what is in the BE: 
that is intentional. The pre-update snapshot retains the version-stamped 
name such as 15.0-RELEASE-p8_2026-05-24, which does describe its 
contents. "HEAD" is not meant to describe contents but to indicate 
position: it is always the tip of the freebsd-update managed state, 
analogous to HEAD in version control.

I agree that "original" has the same weakness in not describing its 
contents. Naming it after the installed version, such as "15.0-RELEASE", 
would be more informative.

Takashi