Vlad K. wrote:
The quarterly branch (Q) is intended to provide a set of "stable"
packages that in the lifetime of such a branch, receive only bug and
security fixes. That is the theory and intent behind the branch. In
practice, however:
1. The Q branch is cut off at predetermined dates (ie. not when it's
stable and ready), and it is cut off from HEAD, thus including the
state of ports at that moment. This breaks the promise of stability
and guarantees that every 3 months there will be uncertainty as to
whether the fresh new versions are working or not. There is no such
thing as a "Pre-Quarterly repo" which would receive all updates for
the NEXT Q branch-off, and which would freeze and stabilize for some
time before branch-off. And even if it did, 3 months would be too short.
It is effectively not much different from tracking HEAD and doing
updates only every three months, with the added benefit that SOME
security updates will come down sooner. But:
2. Unfortunately not all "security or bug-only fixes" are MFH'd, and
as a bugzilla triager I've had the opportunity to observe this in
practice. It can be as simple as accepting a minor upstream version
bump, or as complex as requiring cherry-picking and backporting code
if upstream mixes security, bug fixes with new features. It is
none-the-less a manual work requiring ports-secteam to review and
accept the patches. It is not clear who is supposed to do
cherry-picked backporting if the patches to HEAD cannot be MFH'd as
they are. It is also additional burden to the ports-secTEAM which at
the moment is, effectively, one person.
As it is obvious that the promise of a stable repo in its current form
requires manpower and manual work which we do not have, my proposal is
to abandon the promise of "security/bugfix" only changes and adopt the
approach not unlike Gentoo's, in which a "STABLE" repository receives
ALL the updates from HEAD, but only after certain criteria has been
met, like minimal age of changes, no open issues, a certain battery of
regression/integration/unit tests is performed, etc...
The key, I believe, is in automation which we can achieve with this,
and with that offer at least SOME level of stability without broken
promises. The key to this automation is no manual review, which can
only be achieved if we accept ALL changes, but stabilized to certain
degree.
The idea of a "stable" repository is a valiant one, we definitely need
it if we want to increase the usage of FreeBSD in production as more
than just a base OS that does routing and ZFS storage -- namely
production use of stable ports. And IMHO we only need to balance
between how stable we can provide/guarantee it and what resources and
manpower we have available to do so.
What are the community's thoughts on this?
That's what it needed but people charging through new versions and
linuxifying FreeBSD screwed the pooch... This conversation/thread should
have happened 2 years back.
Michelle
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