The ports collection has some serious issues

[Shane Ambler]

On 12/12/2016 23:14, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
> [Default] On Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:01:33 +1030, Shane Ambler
> <FreeBSD at ShaneWare.Biz> wrote:

>> The quarterly ports has been setup for a couple of years but doesn't
>> seem to be documented well, or it just isn't obvious to find. You can
>> use svn to checkout a stable branch by specifying a branch name, such as
>> ports/branches/2016Q4 instead of ports/head. You can also adjust pkg to
>> use the quarterly ports by changing the pkg repo URL from
>> pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest to pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly
>
> That's interesting.  The ones that break on me are the ones I get
> from portsnap.  Does portsnap tap quarterly or something else?

Pretty sure portsnap gets snapshots from HEAD. Don't see a way to set
quarterly for it, so svn would be needed to get a quarterly ports tree.

It would mostly be a matter of timing, a snapshot is made for portsnap 
and a pkg build is started. By the time the pkg repo is built (a day? 
two?) a new snapshot would be in use by portsnap so it would never be in 
sync with the pkg repo.

It might be worth changing defaults to use quarterly for both portsnap 
and pkg. An average user shouldn't have issues to only getting new 
versions every three months, for those that want to stay on the cutting 
edge a few settings can be changed to use HEAD and/or latest.

-- 
FreeBSD - the place to B...Software Developing

Shane Ambler