Using Quarterly Ports Branches
Chris Wells
freebsd at chriswells.io
Fri Mar 3 04:01:43 UTC 2017
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
More information about the freebsd-ports
mailing list