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

[Grzegorz Junka]

>>> 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
>

Are there any advantages of using pkg instead of pkgsrc on FreeBSD?

Instead of having branches by OS version, would having ports LTS 
branches independent of the base system be a better solution?

Grzegorz