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

On 5/26/26 17:24, Ronald Klop wrote:
>
> *Van:* Takashi Shimizu <[email protected]>
> *Datum:* zondag, 24 mei 2026 13:53
> *Aan:* [email protected]
> *Onderwerp:* Proposal: Improve BE naming convention in freebsd-update 
> install
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I've read the rest of the thread also but reply on this one as it 
> keeps the context of your question.
> Bectl does not tell the user how to name the "active" BE. You can see 
> which is active by the |NR| parameters.
>
> You probably activated |15.0-RELEASE-p8_2026-05-21_183216| yourself in 
> the past and then it sticks with that name. Because that is the BE you 
> choose.
> If you want it to have another name, you can easily rename it yourself 
> on your system.
>
> |bectl rename 15.0-RELEASE-p8_2026-05-21_183216 HEAD|
>
> After the next run of freebsd-update you will have a new timestamped 
> BE, but the active and updated one will still be named HEAD. 🥳
>
> NB: Renaming a BE can give issues when using zfs send | zfs receive to 
> a backup system. As the names on the backup didn't change, the ZFS 
> filesystems+snapshots on the backup are out of sync now.
>
> Regards,
> Ronald.

Thank you for the suggestion.

However, my proposal is not about how users name their BEs manually. It 
is specifically about the names that freebsd-update generates automatically.

The target audience is users who do not actively manage their BEs and 
are not familiar with bectl. When something goes wrong after a 
freebsd-update run and they need to roll back urgently, they look at 
bectl list and have to figure out which BE to activate. At that moment, 
the automatically generated names are misleading and cost them valuable 
time.

Users who carefully manage their own BEs, as you describe, are already 
handling this well and are not affected by this proposal.

Takashi