what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[George Mitchell]

On 12/06/16 21:59, Jason Unovitch wrote:
> 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.
> [...]

If only!  At least the current base releng does not arbitrarily
disappear every three months.                         -- George