what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Ben Woods]

On Tue., 6 Dec. 2016 at 4:44 am, Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> they are effectively useless because the results are not archived, and
> the quarterly pkg branch actually changes day by day, so making two
> machines from the same quarterly branch can give you different
> machines (making it useless for paying work)
>
> not to mention that if you use the quarterly pkg branch you run he
> risk of it completely changing if you happen to be unlucky enough to
> be doing it across a quarterly boundary. then you end up with a
> completely messed up system. (from experience).
>
>
> SO a couple of things.. new quarterly pkg releases should have
> different names and be pointed to by a symlink or something. Other
> wise you can't avoid the smashed system problem. (half the pkgs from
> one quarter and the other half from the previous one, which you can't
> find any more.
>
>
> But the big question still remains..
>
> What do you think you are solving and why are they changing? shouldn't
> a snapshot be stable?
>
>
>
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I believe the concept is simply: provide a set of ports that does not
change for 3 months, with the exception of security updates and fixes for
broken functionality. It also offers a certain degree of predictability:
you shouldn't see a big set of pkg updates until the new calendar quarter,
when you can plan for it.

Regards,
Ben