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

[Grzegorz Junka]

On 22/06/2017 23:16, Baho Utot wrote:
> On 6/22/2017 6:36 PM, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
>> scratch65535 at att.net wrote on 2017/06/23 00:15:
>>> [Default] On Thu, 22 Jun 2017 16:11:26 -0500, Mark Linimon
>>> <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 12:32:45PM -0400, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
>>>>> My problem is that my industry experience tells me that reducing
>>>>> the frequency of port releases is practically *guaranteed* to be
>>>>> a Really Good Thing for everyone.
>>>>
>>>> I remember before we had the quarterly releases, and people on the
>>>> mailing lists complained constantly about the ports bits only being
>>>> available once per release, or rolling with -head.
>>>
>>> Mark, I can only suppose that those complainers are dilettantes
>>> of some sort who believe that having The Latest-And-Greatest Bits
>>> is a social-status enhancer.  **Nobody** with real work to do
>>> ever willingly fools away time "fixing" what isn't broken.
>>
>> And this is where you are so wrong. Ports tree is never in the state 
>> where everything works and has no bugs. (and cannot be, because 
>> upstreams have bugs) Even if it compiles and installs it does not 
>> mean that it is not broken and nobody needs newer version.
>> Just because your needs are different than others doesn't mean others 
>> are dilettantes.
>>
>
> That is just an argument to not do anything, by default.
>
> Here is my point, I am a user that installs an OS ( FreeBSD-11.0). 
> Then builds the base from releng-11.0.  Followed by building the ports 
> I need.  That doesn't give me a usable system always. Should I not be 
> able to do the above and expect a stable system? If not I am running 
> the wrong OS/system.  Updates are another monster as I do not want to 
> place my now running system ( finally stable ) and do this all over 
> again.  I am not up for that.  Hell FreeBSD can not even boot my dual 
> boot system Win7 and FreeBSD 11.0 on zfs raid without going to BIOS 
> and selecting the disk to boot from.  No one here could point me to 
> how to set it up using grub as a boot loader!  The only information I 
> got was to wing it using half baked information.

A user would probably start with precompiled packages. Only power users 
who know what they are doing would try to compile the packages 
themselves, and at that point I would expect them to know a thing or two 
about verifying that they compile and work fine.
Grzegorz