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Comment by GalacticDomin8r | Hacker News Reader

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GalacticDomin8r

> Does this mean that version numbers for software in ports and pkg will be frozen and security fixes backported?

ports has already had this for some time:

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

There might be semi-official repos for those somewhere as well. Or you can always build your own with poudriere.

> Coming from Debian, I long for a similar model in FreeBSD.

Oh hell no. This gives silly issues like Lenny's pigz being broken for like 4 years. Or OpenSuse's crappy model which shipped a shitty version of kde4 long after it had become stable elsewhere.

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If you ship software for Debian and you've been frustrated that your users get stuck with a lousy version of a dependency, I can understand that.

I've been admining Debian boxes for more than a decade so I'm aware of the drawbacks of its policies. That's why my desktop tracks unstable. But for a sysadmin, freezing everything for long periods of time makes for an enormous reduction in churn-related administration time. Having nothing but security updates to install until the next version comes out 2+ years later is excellent. For the exceptions, pinning can often solve the problem. And if pinning doesn't work, there's always building from source.

Like I said above, I'm new to FreeBSD so I'm not sure how much churn I'll have to endure, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

I understood why you like tracking a security branch as I have been admining *nix boxes for 15+ years.

Where that approach fails is that as a sysadmin one of the responsibilities is to provide good tools to the user, not reduce work for the sysadmin. The user might be a SaaS platform, developers or more traditional (l)users. Regardless, you want your platform to be stable and efficient from a user perspective. Tracking a "Security" branch only give you one of those in many cases.

It's an apples to oranges in some regards because FreeBSD OS patchsets are essentially the "Security" branch while ports is a different issue(and one the user is most likely concerned about).

ports has already had this for some time:

I think he meant branches which are supported for an extended duration. The quarterly branches are (currently, and as far as I know this isn't going to change) supported only for the quarter in question.

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