what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Grzegorz Junka]

On 13/12/2016 18:05, Julian Elischer wrote:
> On 7/12/2016 10:12 PM, George Mitchell wrote:
>> On 12/06/16 21:59, Jason Unovitch wrote:
>>> On Mon, Dec 05, 2016 at 10:48:20PM +0000, Ben Woods wrote:
>>>> On Tue., 6 Dec. 2016 at 4:44 am, Julian Elischer 
>>>> <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> they are effectively useless because the results are not archived, 
>>>>> and
>>>>> the quarterly pkg branch actually changes day by day, so making two
>>>>> machines from the same quarterly branch can give you different
>>>>> machines (making it useless for paying work)
>>>>>
>>>>> not to mention that if you use the quarterly pkg branch you run he
>>>>> risk of it completely changing if you happen to be unlucky enough to
>>>>> be doing it across a quarterly boundary. then you end up with a
>>>>> completely messed up system. (from experience).
>>>>>
>>> If you are handling the burden of support for a customer then perhaps
>>> Poudriere and building internally is the best option. Then if you want
>>> to stay on an older quarterly because none of what you deploy to
>>> customers is impacted by security issues you can roll them at your own
>>> pace.
>>>
>>>>> But the big question still remains..
>>>>>
>>>>> What do you think you are solving and why are they changing? 
>>>>> shouldn't
>>>>> a snapshot be stable?
>>>
>>> Think releng compared to stable in the src repo rather than
>>> release/stable.  They change in the same fashion to get SA (in the form
>>> of VuXML) and errata worthy fixes.
>>> [...]
>> If only!  At least the current base releng does not arbitrarily
>> disappear every three months.                         -- George
>
> so I think there is a simple partial fix to stop SOME of the worst 
> problems.
> Name the package quarterly sets the same as the ports branches, Use a 
> symlink to point to them.
> and keep them around for 6 months, so there are always 2, one of which 
> has pretty much stopped changing.
> (and provide an EASY way to snarf the lot. currently it's done via an 
> index.html or something that screws it up.

I heard that ports' SVN is mirrored to Github. Isn't it enough to just 
create a branch or tag for each quarterly release? Even if quarterly 
packages are deleted, re-building packages from such branch/tag should 
allow to recreate those packages as required since the same code would 
give the same packages?

Grzegorz