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
