[RFC] Why FreeBSD ports should have branches by OS version

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 02:18:56PM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 02:15:02PM +0200, David Demelier wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Today I've upgraded one of my personal FreeBSD servers. It's running
> > FreeBSD 11.0 for a while.
> > 
> > While I use quarterly ports branches, I usually update my ports tree
> > before installing a new service and I faced some troubles:
> > 
> > www/node was updated from 6.x to 7.x: unfortunately my etherpad
> > instance is not compatible with 7.x. I needed to install www/node6.
> > 
> > devel/mercurial was updated to 4.2: redmine has a small issue making
> > repository browsing unavailable. I temporarily downgraded Mercurial to
> > 4.0.
> > 
> > I think the current process of having rolling-releases packages makes
> > unpredictable upgrades as we have to manually check if the upgrade
> > will be fine or not. When a user installs FreeBSD 11.0 on its system,
> > it probably expects that everything will work fine until a next major
> > upgrade like 12.0. That's why I think we really should implement
> > branches for a specific FreeBSD version.
> > 
> > When FreeBSD 12.0 is released, we should create a ports branch that
> > will contains only fixes (such as security advisories, crash fixes and
> > such). No minor or major upgrades until a new 13.0 version is
> > released. This is the only way to make safe upgrades.
> > 
> > If user think that a software is too old (since we have long delay
> > between major releases) it can still use the default tree at its own
> > risks.
> > 
> > Additional benefits of having a ports tree by version: you don't need
> > to have conditionals in ports Makefiles (how many ports check for
> > FreeBSD version? a lot).
> > 
> > Any comments are appreciated.
> 
> As usual with such proposal, where do you find the manpower to handle the number
> of branches required (the quarterly branches are already hard to maintain, it is
> only one branch).
> 
> What do you do for security fixes: backport to the stable version? who is
> backporting to software not maintained upstream any more in the given branch?
> 
> Bapt

Oh and of course the day you freeze a branch you will have complain about "how
do I get python 3.8 on freebsd 11.0"

Bapt
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