ABI changes within stable branch

[Aristedes Maniatis]

Matthew Seaman wrote:
> 
> Ports are still being built according to the same policy -- on the
> earliest still-supported release of each major branch.
> 
> It's just that now, for 11.x and subsequent, 11.0 goes out of support a
> month or so after 11.1-RELEASE comes out.  You're meant to have upgraded
> by now.  The 11.0 -> 11.1 upgrade is intended to be a pretty routine
> thing that you can do about as freely as you can apply a security patch
> or other update within the 11.0 series.

I'm afraid this hasn't made things clearer for me at all.

1. What does the "stable" branch mean if the ABI is no longer stable

2. This policy of changing the ABI means that upgrading from 11.0 to 11.1 is now less routine than it used to be in the old days. Each minor update is more like the effort involved in upgrading 10 -> 11. So I'll be doing it less often, not more often.

3. Packages are located in a namespace like this: https://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64  But now I don't know which release this is actually pointing to or which packages will work.

4. /etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf points to url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly" However this is now wrong. If I am delayed in upgrading my system, downloading packages from there will sometimes break things. And I will not know until runtime.

5. The package MANIFEST contains information about system compatibility. That is just the major version, but we need the minor release version now too.


Here are some possible solutions from where I'm sitting on the edges:

a. Go back to 'stable' meaning the ABI doesn't change. Not just the kernel, but the whole OS.

b. Since there is no different in breakage and effort when going from 11.0 -> 11.1 or when going from 11.0 -> 12.0, just get rid of the point releases entirely. Then the existing packaging system still works.

c. Add point releases to the package manifest. We've have something like  https://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11.0:x86:64

d. Wait for some new base packaging magic to solve things.


Have I summarised this effectively?

Ari


-- 
-------------------------->
Aristedes Maniatis
CEO, ish
https://www.ish.com.au
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