@kdragon75 and others
I am going to work with our Release Engineer for Beta2 (set to be released very soon) to put out communication on the forum, but as far as the stable branch, it will not happen until after the final 11.2 proper goes out and we branch for 11.3. The “stable” part of the branch name refers to the state of the kernel/OS, not the code. Here is a brief reasoning behind it....the train name represents the branch that will remain through the lifecycle of the 11.2 series. If we changed the name of the train mid-stream, users would not be able to update from a BETA or RC release. The release notes (in the Update page of the UI and at
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/knowledgebase_category/freenas-release-notes/) indicate if a release is still in the pre-release stage and any known issues with that version.
Here is the ticket in Redmine-
https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/38660#note-1
There is always room for improvement and this is something that we will investigate to see how we can improve the UI/UX of that updates menus.
I believe this was mentioned earlier, but just in case...I am going to work with our Technical Information Management team to assemble a FAQ forum post/documentation that can help answer some of these type of questions. If time allows before that, we may do an AMA on the forum to collect more questions from the community. Some of the things listed above, such as this being deliberate or using the community as “Beta Testers”, is far from the truth. Yes we depend on and encourage you to download the latest released software, so you can enjoy the features and fixes that are available in the releases.
Also, we give you a way to submit issues that you find, because we know many people run very complex configurations in their environment, and we want to try to make your experience as great as possible. Every single day, someone is reviewing new tickets that are submitted. With our *new* agile approach to things, we will be able to fix those issues even quicker than before.
Lastly, thank you for your invaluable feedback.
-Ben
Ben Gadd MBA
Program Manager
iXsystems