It is also terribly stupid for software and application developers to run -CURRENT (as a base/primary platform) because it's for the development of the OS itself.
from the Rawhide wiki:
"Not recommended for production systems
We do not recommend that you run Rawhide as your primary production operating system. Instead, we suggest you could install and run Rawhide:
As a live environment only
In a virtual machine (VM) instance
On a secondary system
On a multiboot system, alongside a stable release of Fedora or another operating system
This allows you to test Rawhide without any impact to your day-to-day workflow. "
-CURRENT is the freebsd version of that: you know that it's going to be where things are being torn out and put back in on a hour to hour basis.
The group of people using -CURRENT is akin to the group of kernel maintainers in linux-land.
I do admit though - the rawhide warning is more verbose and clearer than the FREEBSD-CURRENT warnings. That's one part that I can see the community improving. I might even write some verbiage myself for contribution.
and be subscribed to the -CURRENT mailing list - which the development documentation indicate as mandatory when using a -CURRENT build.
Then you would know whether the compiler suite is being torn out (remember? FreeBSD switched from GCC to LLVM/Clang - yes - that was done in the last -CURRENT development cycle)
So your software might not even build because of certain base OS issues. BUT you would know all that already - and you would run -CURRENT in a VM that you blow away and rebuild as needed.
The closest linux analogy is Linus's unstable git branch or maybe the redhat rawhide https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide - even that has warnings:
from the Rawhide wiki: "Not recommended for production systems
We do not recommend that you run Rawhide as your primary production operating system. Instead, we suggest you could install and run Rawhide:
This allows you to test Rawhide without any impact to your day-to-day workflow. "-CURRENT is the freebsd version of that: you know that it's going to be where things are being torn out and put back in on a hour to hour basis.
The group of people using -CURRENT is akin to the group of kernel maintainers in linux-land.
I do admit though - the rawhide warning is more verbose and clearer than the FREEBSD-CURRENT warnings. That's one part that I can see the community improving. I might even write some verbiage myself for contribution.