ffmpeg port

[David Demelier]

Le 10/07/2019 à 13:59, Jan Beich a écrit :
> Why not use binary packages? Or why not build a quarterly branch?
> Or does anyone have better ideas?

Unfortunately quarterly branches do not solve anything. They are just to 
short to have any benefit. Let say you build a package in January and 
then you don't touch your system for a while. In September, you realize 
you need another port but your local ports also have vulnerabilities. 
Now you have to update by changing the quarterly branch since others are 
no longer maintained. Then, you may have some local ports that will be 
upgraded to a major version which can be undesired for a production 
server. This happened to me a while ago when I had to run an old version 
of nodejs for an old version of etherpad, after an upgrade the new 
nodejs version was no longer compatible and I needed to install node6 
port quickly (hopefully it was available !).

This can be very frustrating since FreeBSD is a rock solid server OS 
that comes with strong compatibility conventions in releases versions 
but provides a ports tree in a rolling release fashion that do not match 
the base version (unlike OpenBSD does). Then you have to carefully check 
each time you need to update your ports that you won't break your system 
(like many do with Arch, Gentoo, etc). IMHO, FreeBSD definitely requires 
a per-RELEASE branches of ports that contain only bugfixes/security fixes.

-- 
David