help me understand latest->quarterly pkg.conf switch

[Nikolai Lifanov]

I noticed that in stable/10, /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf was switched from 
using latest package set to whichever one that is "quarterly" word is 
pointing to at the moment. What is the motivation for this change?

Quarterly package sets are useful if the end-user is able to pick which 
one to pull from and there is some amount of time of support overlap so 
that the user has time to validate the new package set and switch his 
systems to it (like what is done with pkgsrc). As-is, "quarterly" works 
just like "latest" from end-user perspective, but for most of the 
lifecycle packages are outdated and there is a massive update bomb four 
times per year.

Port branches are still valuable to those building their own packages, 
since they can support the previous (unsupported by the project) branch, 
backporting fixes manually, while validating and upgrading to the new 
one. But, what is the value of the quarterly package set as-is and what 
is the value of switching to this set by default?

- Nikolai Lifanov