[Bug 272795] FreeBSD Handbook section 4.5.1 could be better.

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=272795

--- Comment #4 from Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> ---
(In reply to Graham Perrin ◐ from comment #3)

> Six revisions by me in recent weeks. If you can take a fresh look at the wiki page
> (without the FreeBSD Handbook as context or comparison), does the page help to 
> demystify things?

I think I understand it well enough, but my opinion is that the combination of
how
packages and ports work is not very user friendly.  However it's possible I
don't
understand it.  Let me describe what I think is my understanding:

- If I do a "pkg update" with the default configuration it will grab the
"quarterly"
  package snapshot from a directory.  E.g. if I run it on February 2023 it will
go 
  get 2023Q1 ports built stuff and if I run it again in April 2023 it will jump
to 
  2023Q2 ports built stuff automatically.

  - It looks to me like this is done by building packages from the quarterly
ports
    snapshot and then dumping them in /quarterly on the mirrors.  Building from
head
    appears to go into /latest, if I understand right.

  - I can find no way to make "pkg" tell me what quarterly snapshot was used to
build
    the current packages on the mirror.

  - I can find no way to make "pkg" tell me what quarterly snapshot index is on
my
    local disk.

  - I can find no way to make "pkg" tell me what quarterly snapshot an
individual
    installed package came from.

- If in February I also do a "git checkout -b 2023Q1 .../ports.git I will get
the
  corresponding ports snapshot.  But come April either 1) It says on the 2023Q1 
  branch because all I do is a git pull, or 2) I must manually do a git
checkout
  -b 2023Q2.

This causes me to make the following observations:

- pkg has the magic keyword `quarterly` which always gets the current quarter. 
git has 
  no similar keyword (branch, tag, other magic).

- Checking if ports and packages are in sync is hard.

- Updating ports is more manual than updating packages, I have to figure out
which 
  quarter when I update ports.

I think the most lightweight fix is to add a command to pkg that would print
out the
quarter for the on-disk and/or remote copy in the same format as the git tags.  
Now it's easy programmatically to verify both are in sync, or to write a script
that
jumps git /usr/ports forward when pkg starts emitting a new value.

A medium effort fix would be to add a tag to ports git called "quarterly" that
moves forward
every quarter.  Now as a sysadmin I can just always bring my tree current with
"quarterly".

A high effort fix is as a sysadmin I don't want to manage any of this across a
fleet of 
servers.  I would like to set some variables in /etc/periodic.conf (or maybe
/etc/rc.conf)
that do this automatically:

PKG_UPDATE_QUATERLY="YES"
PORTS_UPDATE_QUATERLY="YES"

Then some magic (I'm thinking maybe the weekly periodic script) would
automatically suck
down new pkg and/or git checkout new ports when we cross a quarterly boundary. 
I never have
to think about updating either one, and the built in checks for out of date
software always
stay current.

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