[FreeBSD-Ports-Announce] [HEADS UP] FreeBSD Ports tree has been tagged with RELEASE_7_EOL

[Thomas Abthorpe]

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that February 28
was the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 7.4
RELEASE and the FreeBSD 7.x STABLE branch.  Neither the infrastructure nor
individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after
that date.  A tag has be created for users who cannot upgrade for some
reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest
ports repository and use the RELEASE_7_EOL tag instead.

While many people still use RELENG_7, it is at the end of its development
cycle. The Ports Management team has set the following policies with regard
to EOL/EOS of this branch and would like to let developers know that:

- We do not require committers/maintainers to support 7.x, although ports
will need to be marked as BROKEN/IGNORE if they do not build/run.

- Port maintainers are encouraged to accept patches from the community that
allow their ports to build and run on 7.x.  However, since running on 7.x
is no longer a requirement, maintainers may use their discretion in cases
where a proposed patch would be disruptive to other supported FreeBSD
branches, or would unreasonably impede ongoing maintenance of the port.

- We strongly encourage all users and developers to migrate to the FreeBSD
8.x or 9.x branch, both of which is a stable and mature platform, and are
now the reference branches for the ports collection.

Pleae refer to the FreeBSD Security Officer list of unsupported branches
http://www.freebsd.org/security/#unsup