In my experience with open source projects, STABLE should be first on the download list. RELEASE should really be labeled release-candidate, with stable being considered the release.
Re:“RNG broken for last 4 months”
by vertex-four on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @05:10AM
(#9067764)
RELEASE is the release, -STABLE is the minor branch for bugfixes and minor new features that don't break backwards-compatibility ("stable ABI"). -CURRENT is, well, current - it's the tree the developers are working on, and is the current state of FreeBSD, where releases are archives at a particular point (more-or-less).
I suspect much of this goes back to when development wasn't quite so public, so these are names that are meaningful to the developers, not the public.
Re:“RNG broken for last 4 months”
by garrettheaver on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @03:53AM
(#9067593)
Three key words there - "In my experience". Well now you've experienced a project who doesn't fit your current model of the world. Should those of us who have RTFM and experienced different vocabularies adjust to your model or should you recalibrate?
There is RELEASE, CURRENT, STABLE. If you choose one without knowing the difference as to what those titles mean, you deserve whatever comes next.