You are linking to 10-STABLE release notes, and 10.0-RELEASE is something else, than STABLE branch. STABLE's are a bit ahead of RELEASE's and are considered to be less stable than RELEASE's - the wording is a bit misleading.
In that case calling them "Release notes" is even more confusing...
Since 10-RELEASE was just cut it's probably close (identical?) to 10-STABLE, but that won't last long.
It is confusing, however, but there is some logic to it.
Here is an explanation:
- RELEASE is actual release that is forked out (it will only contain security and other critical fixes) of the STABLE branch.
- STABLE is just a development branch (currently it is anything in version 10) as opposed to CURRENT which is a bleeding edge.
- CURRENT is what will be next version (version 11), once they finish adding features it will become next STABLE branch and CURRENT will be used for version 12.
While everything that ends up at STABLE needs to go through pointyhat build system, so it should always compile and pass regression testing, there's still a possibility of things breaking up.
Since 10.0 is about to be released STABLE contains what will become 10.1.
Here's example how the branches look like:
----------------- CURRENT (version 11)
\
-STABLE (version 10) ---
\ \
- 10.0-RELEASE - 10.1-RELEASE
\ \
-p1 -p2
CURRENT = alpha, dev
STABLE = beta, rc
RELEASE = passed all tests and released
That's not to say that things never break in releases. I've seen gjournalled disks (on a gmirror) require fsck (in 8 and 9 -REL) and carp fail (in 7 -REL). Other than those FreeBSD has been the most reliable, secure and up-to-date of any Unix or Linux distribution I've used. My only request would be a policy discouraging ports with perl build-deps, most of which seem to be one-liners that could easily use awk, sed and/or grep instead of forcing a perl build on every upgrade (most not even bothering to remove the build-deps when done).
> FreeBSD-STABLE is the development branch from which major releases are made. Changes go into this branch at a different pace, and with the general assumption that they have first gone into FreeBSD-CURRENT for testing. This is still a development branch, however, and this means that at any given time, the sources for FreeBSD-STABLE may or may not be suitable for any particular purpose. It is simply another engineering development track, not a resource for end-users.