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 _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
