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

[Julian Elischer]

On 22/6/17 10:16 pm, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 10:03:33AM -0400, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
>> [Default] On Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:18:56 +0200, Baptiste Daroussin
>> <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>
>>> 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).
>> Please help me out here, Baptiste, because I'm apparently missing
>> *something*.
>>
>> Out in industry, if you haven't enough people to do a new
>> high-quality release every N months, and you can't get a
>> headcount increase, then you cut the release schedule.  Can't do
>> 4 releases a year?  Cut back to 2.  Still too many?  Cut back to
>> 1.
>>
>> The alternatives to cutting the schedule are that (a) people
>> begin burning out and quitting, (b) quality drops and your
>> customer base begins abandoning you, or (c) both of the above.
>>
>> Why don't the same choices apply here?  What am I missing?
> We only have 1 quarterly branch at the time :)
>
> The model with one branch per release will bring it to way more with a
> maintenance window way larger (actually it is 3 month making the quarterly
> relatively easy to maintain)
Yeah but the quarterly branches are relatively useless because they a 
not sync'd to anything and mean nothing special to anyone.
As soon as you sync to one, it's deleted and replaced by a completely 
different one meaning you have to replace *EVERYTHING*,
so one might as well just use head. it's actually easier.


>
> Best regards,
> Bapt