From owner-freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Thu Jun 22 12:15:04 2017 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C0B9D8B43B for ; Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:15:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from demelier.david@gmail.com) Received: from mail-ua0-x22e.google.com (mail-ua0-x22e.google.com [IPv6:2607:f8b0:400c:c08::22e]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) (Client CN "smtp.gmail.com", Issuer "Google Internet Authority G2" (verified OK)) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id DC083792B1 for ; Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:15:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from demelier.david@gmail.com) Received: by mail-ua0-x22e.google.com with SMTP id 70so15024187uau.0 for ; Thu, 22 Jun 2017 05:15:03 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20161025; h=mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=zICKryFFL5ZCL6D9mBFRDI6B2YW3cVMnmsdCFtk0FQU=; b=TkZ5ArMnK7LkH7jBAoudfhCBdWqZlZjTDO+C4+bkP0jt0YGLM21ZPS3pc9yBrQecOe YVzIgszx6pSfF0YCXQonJMtx7Ch/90YrchTnC/cc91RiyBTEWSlVbHqzjKENiyQebKRo rmHfS2P69b6lkNJu7najKSByb53WLC9f7Se0DV2U22Dr7t+4oBoN1znkbFs3kT4kBI5J 4G4fu7OO25M6zkNLfukrOfD7rqEQG5QRejaTGK4r4Y54lmGokRSJBGr4qfnP8x8gKGAA K7LI3vR4nRxWXt7m3HSuaXRw2WMBBBJztu3rpRuBKPikRdOVYh5jUwp49vNK6/5VOtMx Y3FQ== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20161025; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=zICKryFFL5ZCL6D9mBFRDI6B2YW3cVMnmsdCFtk0FQU=; b=JlrygYa7gkD/fvlfz7+ySkFLM9t4trHi9f4rO4NcAFEedV6YPZaRaUaKa9CDMu5IkX HVpajzKjz5uCRkaYyiNjR6mKJFvuVUwa/caPtrhNe7UaZMnxisqJK/eKqP36x6utPEd1 AwMupmDqNuZKCL9FxVwa8AUlCagQeUNpybK1cU/dMDMLRTms6KyJMI5a6sdaDg91FpNV ulU5qwSwHBoW4hB0nhmWo8Nr/RMiyOk86Co0xRoRxJKXcIL+vJiKpFMzWss5xIIlQCGS GUtYqBaJprsYnYsiMtu1vMpZHoqzP0guwqtC1ViV/hlilk2pu+NcmE+Yb+RrCgIz80vf MFBw== X-Gm-Message-State: AKS2vOx57xQwhQ4xgMoyhNbFTXAzPHkQlV1jgXzOVe4bZ4VWYoILkGX9 FwibHQD0Q75ChbBh6rQhWO+Iyko2d3E8 X-Received: by 10.176.69.100 with SMTP id r91mr2303915uar.153.1498133702703; Thu, 22 Jun 2017 05:15:02 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.103.178.70 with HTTP; Thu, 22 Jun 2017 05:15:02 -0700 (PDT) From: David Demelier Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:15:02 +0200 Message-ID: Subject: [RFC] Why FreeBSD ports should have branches by OS version To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2017 12:15:04 -0000 Hello, Today I've upgraded one of my personal FreeBSD servers. It's running FreeBSD 11.0 for a while. While I use quarterly ports branches, I usually update my ports tree before installing a new service and I faced some troubles: www/node was updated from 6.x to 7.x: unfortunately my etherpad instance is not compatible with 7.x. I needed to install www/node6. devel/mercurial was updated to 4.2: redmine has a small issue making repository browsing unavailable. I temporarily downgraded Mercurial to 4.0. I think the current process of having rolling-releases packages makes unpredictable upgrades as we have to manually check if the upgrade will be fine or not. When a user installs FreeBSD 11.0 on its system, it probably expects that everything will work fine until a next major upgrade like 12.0. That's why I think we really should implement branches for a specific FreeBSD version. When FreeBSD 12.0 is released, we should create a ports branch that will contains only fixes (such as security advisories, crash fixes and such). No minor or major upgrades until a new 13.0 version is released. This is the only way to make safe upgrades. If user think that a software is too old (since we have long delay between major releases) it can still use the default tree at its own risks. Additional benefits of having a ports tree by version: you don't need to have conditionals in ports Makefiles (how many ports check for FreeBSD version? a lot). Any comments are appreciated. Regards, -- Demelier David