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

[scratch65535 at att.net]

[Default] On Mon, 26 Jun 2017 19:33:50 +0000, Grzegorz Junka
<list1 at gjunka.com> wrote:

>we could 
>start small with a just a handful of ports in a stable LTS (Long Term 
>Support) branch. Develop processes around maintaining them, get some 
>feedback about the effort of applying only security fixes, then add more 
>ports as required or as viable from the resources point of view. How 
>does that sound?

It sounds excellent, at least to me.  

How many platform roles are seen as fbsd's metier?    

Firewall?  Already handled.

Specialist workstations such as sound/video editing?  Maybe.  I
don't know enough about that to have an opinion.

Servers.  No question.  That's always been freebsd's best thing.
The number of ports to build a server-of-all-work is not large.
Unnecessarily complex and a source of uncontrolled errors, yes,
but not really *large* qua large.