what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Willem Jan Withagen]

On 16-12-2016 11:10, Julian Elischer wrote:
> On 16/12/2016 4:01 PM, Dave Cottlehuber wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 13 Dec 2016, at 23:14, Grzegorz Junka wrote:
>>> I heard that ports' SVN is mirrored to Github. Isn't it enough to just
>>> create a branch or tag for each quarterly release? Even if quarterly
>>> packages are deleted, re-building packages from such branch/tag should
>>> allow to recreate those packages as required since the same code would
>>> give the same packages?
>> These branches already exist BTW:
>>
>> https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/tree/branches/2016Q3
> 
> the trouble is that the packages are deleted as soon as they are stable.

It is sort of amusing/depressing/hilarious of all the flavours and ways
everybody works with ports. And I've used them all, just hard core
building, postmaster, portsnap, pouderiere...
Each has its merit, but IMHO everything is not as bad as frozen in stone
CentOS packages. Where I have the feeling that I'm years behind on some
of the stuff, and the only way out is to start gathering and build
manually. Ports is way more comfortable.

For the Q-branches:
Storage could be an issue, but isn't this why we have ZFS with
snapshot/clones.... Just at the end of a Q freeze both ports and
distfiles in a snapshot.

--WjW