Is pkg quarterly really needed?

[Kurt Jaeger]

Hi!

> >> If the whole repository builds doesn't it mean by default that any
> >> subset also builds?

> > If we defined a repo build only as valid if everything builds,
> > the whole repo is never valid, because approx. 10% of
> > the ports tree breaks at any given time. More, if you add options.

> That's an interesting observation, I didn't know that. Does it mean that 
> the quarterly port tree is no better or worse than the main branch?

It's a little bit better, I guess. Oh, indeed, I erred with my numbers.

Here's the link I'm looking at right now:

http://beefy9.nyi.freebsd.org/jail.html?mastername=110amd64-default

It has stats on the full ports builds for 11.0-amd64.

Approx. 26000 ports, approx. 50 failed to build, 70 skipped, 300+ ignored.

So it looks much better than I thought, but not 100%.

> And is any tree ever build with non-default options?

I don't know. I build my own repos with these settings:

DEFAULT_VERSIONS= perl5=5.24 python=2.7 python3=3.6 ruby=2.3 pgsql=9.6 php=7.1 mysql=10.1m gcc=6

And I use some non-default options, but not that many.

> >> My assumption was that only version
> >> upgrades are progressed from CURRENT to STABLE to RELEASE.

> > Leads to a stagnating tree downstream, if you find maintainers for it.
> > That's the model Debian is using, and it has other issues. [...]

> Well, they can't be as unhappy as, say, Centos, where packages are 
> really old. Also, I bet not all users are unhappy when the ports are not 
> updated quickly. Corporate users tend to prefer stable versions even if 
> they are getting a bit old, enthusiasts tend to prefer newest versions. 

Hmm, our company isn't big, but keeping up with the security
stuff needs to happen, anyway, so we mostly use recent pkg trees.
Like the saying goes: Update early, update often, automate updates.

Incremental learnings/breakings are easier to handle than huge
across-the-board upgrades.

That's my experience after almost 30 years in that field.
Believe me, I already tried other approaches 8-} I still
have a FreeBSD 4.11 box in my fleet to care about, where
I recently updated OpenSSH and bind 8-}

> FreeBSD can't cater for both groups a the same time.

Here I disagree! Right now, ports-HEAD surely *does* cater for
the upgrade-junkies 8-}, but this also allows very fast innovation
cycles.

The quarterly trees are a first step to test how stability can also
be provided. We're still learning.

> Which group has been chosen, if it has been chosen?

It's also an ecosystem thing. If the 'stable at a price' niche
is covered by Debian etc, FreeBSD in the past needed to find
another niche. But it's not exclusivly so, so the quarterly tree
was created. The first was 2014Q1, so we're 14 iterations into
this experiment. Still plenty of things to learn.

> Are we defaulting to enthusiasts?

I don't think so! We're doing what we can to cover all use-cases.

-- 
pi at opsec.eu            +49 171 3101372                         3 years to go !