My advice is: stick to releases for now on important systems that you mustn't break, but also setup on a spare machine or VM that you don't mind breaking from time to time, use base os + package snapshots, maybe play with compiling a few things yourself - basically play around and find out what works and what doesn't.
Breaking this type of system from time to time is a good thing. :-) It gives you a good opportunity to work out how to recover from various problems without too much stress. > System running -current kernel with snapshots are even > less stable than one running -current and using fully > compiled userspace from ports source tree. Generally: -current is not meant to be "unstable" in terms of operation, it's more that it's subject to more rapid change and you may occasionally have things like package breakage until new packages are available following API/ABI changes. If you're running much from ports, snapshots are usually a lot easier to get on with than compiling from scratch. At hackathon times and at some other times when there are major changes in the tree this often gets a bit more fragile. Recently we've been in a "bit more fragile than usual" sort of stage. It is still important that people run new code in this situation and report on problems, but use common sense as to where you run this :) The reverse applies as we approach lock for release and changes are much more conservative. If you're following -current then I strongly recommend reading the source-changes mailing list (or some alternative) to get a feel for what's going on in the OS, and when is a good or bad time to upgrade.
