Welcome flavors! portmaster now dead? synth?

Adam Weinberger adamw at adamw.org
Sun Dec 3 23:15:44 UTC 2017


> On 3 Dec, 2017, at 14:31, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:
> 
> Adam Weinberger wrote:
>> 
>> You seem very angry about things breaking in HEAD, Baho. Things break in HEAD sometimes. This is why we recommend that end-users who can't have breakages, or users who depend on undeveloped tools, stay on the quarterly branch. Portmaster works perfectly on quarterly. Always has.
>> 
> 
> Quarterly is just a frozen HEAD with no/minute chances of security patches or other changes... why would you want to be there?  I couldn't even get someone to patch a security issue before the pkg_*->pkgng change..  was patched 4 days later despite having the patch in the bug before... and despite asking for the patch to be put in the quarterly they didn't either.  One continues to watch the exodus.

The MFH process was very complicated at first, and many committers didn't participate in it. Now it's largely automated and expected of all ports committers. The quarterly branches these days receive essentially all security fixes and most build fixes. As with all things FreeBSD, it's a best-effort process.

Quarterly is mostly static, and receives no unnecessary updates. It also receives no known breakages. That's the tradeoff between it and head.

We do the best we can, and if things get missed it's because we need more community involvement. If you can't handle the flux of HEAD, stay on quarterly. If you need the cutting-edge, use HEAD. As you noted, we are strained for resources to keep quarterly going; we simply don't have the ability to provide another in-between level.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org



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