what is the purpose of the quarterly ports branches?

[Grzegorz Junka]

On 16/12/2016 10:10, 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.

But it shouldn't be that much work to rebuild them? Setting up poudriere 
took one afternoon.
Greg