Quarterly Branch Ports and Packages

Definition

quarterly is the familiar name for:

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:

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:

More precisely:

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:

  1. mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos

  2. echo "FreeBSD: { url: \"pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/\${ABI}/latest\" }" > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf

  3. 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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Ports/QuarterlyBranch (last edited 2023-11-22T05:07:41+0000 by MarkLinimon)