[RFC] Why FreeBSD ports should have branches by OS version
Vlad K.
vlad-fbsd at acheronmedia.com
Fri Jun 23 08:38:32 UTC 2017
On 2017-06-23 10:26, demelier.david at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Release branches won't have many maintenance except individual bug
> fixes when security advisories are found. No backport, no updates.
Nothing prevents the maintainers from doing exactly that right now. But
you see, there are two kinds of ports in the tree:
1) ports where upstream maintains a concept of LTS
2) ports that mix bug, security fixes and new features in even
point.point releases
For some (all?) major production software like Apache, nginx, PHP,
PostgreSQL, MySQL (I think?), Postfix, Dovecot2, etc... #1 applies. So
for serious production servers this should be easy to maintain as the
upstream is doing that in the first place.
The problem is then with ports of type #2. And there's lots of them.
Gentoo portage can easily maintain "stable" ports because portage
doesn't have a single Makefile, it has multiple .ebuild files so
multiple versions are available under ONE port name, and bumping the
version while keeping previous ones available is literally just a matter
of making a copy of the latest .ebuild and fixing the version in it like
we do with PORTVERSION.
On FreeBSD that's impossible and often ports are separated and version
baked into the port name. Like www/node from the original post of this
thread.
But again, that's all doable without having to introduce new
infrastructure. The ports tree as is can be maintained like this and
quarterly repos would NOT be required. All it's needed is for
maintainers to keep a stable version and a latest version. There's
already plenty of ports done like that, otoh postfix and
postfix-current, nginx and nginx-devel, etc...
Because the BIGGEST problem in maintaining separate "stable" or LTS
branches is BACKPORTING fixes for ports in the #2 category, ie. those
that mix new features with fixes, so you have to CHERRY PICK only the
fix and BACKPORT it to your "stable" branch. And that's even more work
often introducing NEW bugs.
BTW, the problem of the original post could've been avoided if the user
only read UPDATING which clearly stated that www/node becomes 7 and
previous node (6) becomes www/node6. (20161207) entry.
--
Vlad K.
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