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diff --git a/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/_index.adoc b/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/_index.adoc
--- a/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/_index.adoc
+++ b/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/_index.adoc
@@ -596,6 +596,48 @@
Branch names, such as `stable/9`, are listed at link:https://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/[www.freebsd.org/releng].
. Before compiling or upgrading to FreeBSD-STABLE , read [.filename]#/usr/src/Makefile# carefully and follow the instructions in <<makeworld>>. Read the {freebsd-stable} and [.filename]#/usr/src/UPDATING# to keep up-to-date on other bootstrapping procedures that sometimes become necessary on the road to the next release.
+[[translate-n-number]]
+=== The N-number
+FreeBSD provides version information compiled into the kernel.
+man:uname[1] retrieves this information, for example:
+[source,shell]
+....
+% uname
+FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #112 main-n247514-031260d64c18: Tue Jun 22 20:43:19 MDT 2021 fred@machine:/usr/home/fred/obj/usr/home/fred/git/head/amd64.amd64/sys/FRED
+....
+Looking at the 4th field, it is made up of several parts:
+[source,shell]
+....
+main-n247514-031260d64c18
+
+main <.>
+n247514 <.>
+031260d64c18 <.>
+....
+<.> Git branch name.
+Note: comparisons of N-numbers are only valid on branches published by the project (`main`, `stable/XX` and `releng/XX`).
+Local branches will have N-numbers that will overlap commits of their parent branch.
+<.> The N-number is a linear count of commits back to the start of the Git repository starting with the Git hash included in the line.
+<.> Git hash of the checked out tree
+<.> Sometimes an suffix of `-dirty` is present when the kernel was built in a tree with uncommitted changes.
+It is absent in this example because the FRED kernel was built from a pristine checkout.
+
+The `git rev-list` command is used to find the n-number corresponding to a Git hash.
+For example:
+[source,shell]
+....
+% git rev-list --first-parent --count 031260d64c18 <.>
+247514 <.>
+....
+<.> git hash to translate (the hash from the above example is reused)
+<.> The n-number.
+
+Usually this number is not all that important.
+However, when bug fixes are committed, this number makes it easy to quickly determine whether the fix is present in the currently running system.
+Developers will often refer to the hash of the commit (or provide a URL which has that hash), but not the n-number since the hash is the easily visible identifier for a change while the n-number is not.
+Security advisories and errata notices will also note the n-number, which can be directly compared against your system.
+When you need to use shallow Git clones, you cannot compare n-numbers reliably as the `git rev-list` command counts all the revisions in the repository which a shallow clone omits.
+
[[makeworld]]
== Updating FreeBSD from Source

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