what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Dave Cottlehuber]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2016, at 23:14, Grzegorz Junka wrote:
> 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?

These branches already exist BTW:

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/tree/branches/2016Q3

A+
Dave