Hey sulami, thanks for the response! I did know the rules on upgrading the whole system, in the way that you explained. I initially ran -RELEASE and then decided to run -CURRENT. So as per the FAQ, I installed the "closest available binary", which was a build of the source tree from -CURRENT (snapshot) and went on from there.

After doing some type of test on my system, I did find the answer to my initial question. I was curious to see if one could do a BINARY upgrade of -CURRENT from a COMPILED upgrade of -CURRENT. Meaning, that I downloaded the source tree, built the ENTIRE system, then installed the binaries that I built. Then, I used a pre-built snapshot to do another upgrade. So, to recap on my upgrade timeline, it looks like this, visually:

5.7-RELEASE -> 5.8-CURRENT #1228 (from snapshot) -> 5.8-CURRENT #0 (from source, hence the #0) -> 5.8-CURENT #1234 (from snapshot)

This change in the version number of -CURRENT (from `uname -a`) has led me to believe that I answered my own question. Also, my system does work fine as a result of this process. sysmerge(8) did report some changed files in /etc, but that is to be expected from -CURRENT.

Thanks again for your responses guys. Cheers.