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

[Thomas Mueller]

from Vlad K:

> On 2017-06-23 23:09, Grzegorz Junka wrote:

> > Fine. Considering that maintainers already apply patches to the latest
> > quarterly branch. If there were to be OS version branches, it would
> > mean that maintainers apart from what they are doing now would
> > additionally need to apply selected patches to those OS version
> > branches?

> "OS version branches" would be a complete waste of time and resources, and it
> would remove some level of separation/independence between the base and ports.

> The crux of the problem here is so called "stable ports", not necessarily
> tying them to the life cycle of a base release. It doesn't make sense to tie
> version of a port to the base release. Especially with the new releng support
> schedule that would mean 5 years per major version which is quite a lot.
(snip)

I personally can't see the rationale of many OS version branches of ports: far too much work.

I had the thought of something like that for (NetBSD) pkgsrc: a very tall order, considering that pkgsrc has been ported to many OSes besides NetBSD.

Imagine a separate branch of pkgsrc for every version and branch of NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, etc.

I only follow the current branch of FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc, though now I have also become interested in pkgsrc-synth.

Tom