>> I know everyone's experiences here will vary but I've had very little breakage going between major version of Debian, but with FBSD too many things would break when doing a major release upgrade.
I encounter much the same in Debian/Ubuntu systems on major upgrades too. It all depends on what you are doing, and what the port maintainer has coded to deal with upgrades. If the port maintainer has written scripts to deal with moving old schemas to new ones, great. But that is far from universal. Sometimes FreeBSD does it better, sometimes Debian does it better.
Much more often than not, on FreeBSD or Linux, it usually is simpler to roll out a new machine and roll your data onto it to test. Otherwise I get headaches of incompatibility for either system for what I tend to do.
I encounter much the same in Debian/Ubuntu systems on major upgrades too. It all depends on what you are doing, and what the port maintainer has coded to deal with upgrades. If the port maintainer has written scripts to deal with moving old schemas to new ones, great. But that is far from universal. Sometimes FreeBSD does it better, sometimes Debian does it better.
Much more often than not, on FreeBSD or Linux, it usually is simpler to roll out a new machine and roll your data onto it to test. Otherwise I get headaches of incompatibility for either system for what I tend to do.