Using Quarterly Ports Branches

[Chris Wells]

Hi,

Having upgraded to FreeBSD 11 a few months ago, I moved from latest 
packages and ports to the situation where packages are quarterly by 
default and ports are latest/current/HEAD. I absolutely LOVE the idea of 
a more stable and consistent quarterly package branch, but I'm sure most 
people still have to build a few ports from source. The fact that the 
labels/names are different between packages (latest/quarterly) and ports 
(HEAD/2017Q1) might make it more confusing than it needs to be.

A few questions: If I switch from HEAD to a quarterly ports branch, 
should I "rm -r /usr/ports/*" before checking out the quarterly branch 
from SVN? If so, should I do the same every time I migrate to a newer 
branch (e.g., moving from 2017Q1 to 2017Q2)? I believe it makes sense 
when reverting to an older branch like HEAD to quarterly, but I'm hoping 
it's unnecessary when moving forward. Any other directories that should 
be cleaned for a first-time change to quarterly ports or subsequent 
quarterly migrations?

Would it be possible to "simply" create a symlink at 
https://svn.freebsd.org/ports/branches/quarterly that always points to 
whatever the current quarterly branch is? That way, everyone who wants 
to use quarterly packages/ports wouldn't have to worry about constantly 
switching the ports branch on every system they manage. A side benefit 
would be that packages and ports can share the terminology and meaning 
for their quarterly branch. Bonus points: change pkg and ports to have a 
CURRENT symlink pointed to HEAD and a STABLE symlink pointed to the 
latest quarterly branch so the names are more in sync with the base 
system's branch names.

If the symlink would work and easy enough to manage, it would be a great 
portsnap default in the base system to match pkg. The icing on the cake 
would be a persistent local setting to tell portsnap what branch to use 
so the commands to fetch/update the ports tree are consistent whether 
using HEAD or a branch.

Thanks for all the work you do,

Chris