what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Jason Unovitch]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2016 at 10:48:20PM +0000, Ben Woods wrote:
> 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).
> >

If you are handling the burden of support for a customer then perhaps
Poudriere and building internally is the best option. Then if you want
to stay on an older quarterly because none of what you deploy to
customers is impacted by security issues you can roll them at your own
pace.

> > But the big question still remains..
> >
> > What do you think you are solving and why are they changing? shouldn't
> > a snapshot be stable?


Think releng compared to stable in the src repo rather than
release/stable.  They change in the same fashion to get SA (in the form
of VuXML) and errata worthy fixes.