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Explain branches in ports(7).
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Authored by trasz on Feb 11 2019, 1:49 PM.
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Summary

Add explanation of branches to the ports(7) man page.

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rS FreeBSD src repository - subversion
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matthew added inline comments.
share/man/man7/ports.7
81–83 ↗(On Diff #53784)

What 'quarterly' directory do you mean here? The subdirectory in the SVN repo is 'branches', like so:

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/branches/

There's a 'quarterly' directory on the pkg repos.

share/man/man7/ports.7
69 ↗(On Diff #53784)

The quarterly branches aren't necessarily 'better tested' than ports HEAD. They're just a slower moving target: instead of essentially daily updates with HEAD, you only get updates once every three months or whenever there's a security fix or a significant fix that eg. takes something from not-working to working.

To put it another way: there's no extra QA gets done around branching each quarter. In fact, certain intrusive changes may be held from implementation until a quarter day so that the diff between HEAD and quarterly can be kept workably small.

Explain quarterly branches a bit better.

This revision is now accepted and ready to land.Feb 11 2019, 3:10 PM
This revision was automatically updated to reflect the committed changes.