Quarterly Branch Ports and Packages
Contents
Definition
quarterly is the familiar name for:
ports branched from main at the beginning of every January, April, July, and October
- the binary package sets that are produced from the most recent quarterly branch.
Each quarterly branch is named according to the year (YYYY) and quarter (Q1-4) of its creation.
Purpose
A user experience (UX), for port and package installations and upgrades, that is more predictable and stable than the UX for the more dynamic main branch (familiarly: latest).
In essence, changes are limited to:
non-feature updates.
quarterly is the default for FreeBSD-RELEASE versions 10.2-RELEASE and later.
Governance
Ports Management Team (portmgr)
Aims
Receive, on a best effort basis, merge (cherry-pick -x) commits including, but not limited to:
- Security fixes (that may be version updates, or backports of commits)
- Build, run, packaging, or other bug fixes
- Ports compliance/framework changes.
More precisely:
Any change that is not a version update – unless it is a security update – that, other than the intended change, makes no functional change to the resulting package or software.
Merges from main are limited to the most recent quarterly. Prior branches are not supported; no merges.
Examples
The 2023Q4 branch was created in October 2023.
Its commit history can be browsed at:
In Bugzilla:
How to switch from quarterly to latest
On a system where /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf does not yet exist, with sh (not with csh/tcsh):
mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
For versions prior to FreeBSD-15: echo 'FreeBSD: { url = "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest"; }' > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
For FreeBSD-15 and later: echo 'FreeBSD-ports: { url = "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest"; }' > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
pkg upgrade -f to install packages from latest (relatively time-consuming), or pkg update to update the catalogue alone.
Hint: if your system supports ZFS boot environments, create one before the upgrade.
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