2 Questions

[Erick Mechler]

:: Just two quick questions:
:: 
:: 1. Would it be possible or difficult to upgrade FreeBSD 4.8 -STABLE to
::    5.2 -STABLE when it comes out?

Difficult (without completely rebuilding your system and doing a binary 
upgrade).  Source upgrades, while they will work, will leave a lot of 
unnecessary remnants of 4.x on your box.

:: 2. Which is the best for a production environment, -STABLE or -RELEASE
::    Someone told me they think the latter is better because it doesn't
::    require as much downtime for an upgrade.

Both systems require the same amount of time to upgrade, so that's not the 
issue.  The issue is what sort of changes you want to make to your 
production box.  If you track -STABLE then you'll get bug fixes, new 
features, etc.  If you track one of the Security branches, then you'll only 
get security fixes with no new features.

Check out the Handbook on information about what -STABLE actually means:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html

And the definition of all the CVS tags in use today:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html

Cheers - Erick