Comment by cperciva

The hope is that with more frequent releases the upgrade path between minor releases will be smoother -- often in the past we've had breakage due to developers saying "I really need to get this into the tree now because otherwise I'll need to wait over a year for the next release". At some point we might change terminology to say e.g. "FreeBSD 17 update 3" rather than "FreeBSD 17.3" -- I've been saying for long time that we should think about minor updates as service packs rather than full releases.