Re: pkgs for FreeBSD:14:aarch64 latest are stale compared to quarterly

From: void <void_at_f-m.fm>
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2023 16:04:39 UTC
Hi Mark, (have replied to your reply inline)

I don't want to give the impression that I'm foot-tapping 
impatiently for the latest pkg builds. The reason behind the
query was because there are several ports affected by
vulns between say 31st Oct and now. I was looking to see
if there were updates available in pkgs. Found there weren't,
checked and the system was using "latest", so had to build 
directly from the ports tree which was suboptimal on this hardware.
Nevertheless, they all built, the software is up-to-date and 
that problem is solved.

Meanwhile, checked to find the timestamp of 'latest'
and found it was 02 Nov, which was surprisingly ancient to me. I thought
maybe there was something wrong with the/a builder? So checked this
against quarterly, and found quarterly timestamped 2 weeks later than 'latest'.

On Sun, Nov 19, 2023 at 06:28:18AM -0800, Mark Millard wrote:
>On Nov 19, 2023, at 05:44, void <void@f-m.fm> wrote:
>
>> http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:aarch64/latest/meta.txz is dated 2nd Nov
>> http://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:aarch64/quarterly/meta.txz is dated 15th Nov
>
>Note: The below does not deal with time to distribute
>packages after the overall build completes. The dates
>show are start dates, so the start of the next build
>gives about the time of the finish of the prior build.

(snip)

>So: For (only) 140releng-arm64 the finished-dates look like:
>
>31 Oct 2023 finish quarterly
>02 Nov 2023 finish default (a.k.a. latest)
>15 Nov 2023 finish quarterly
>18 Nov 2023 finish default (a.k.a. latest)

so, approx 3 days for a build, if the machine builds quarterly=>latest=>quarterly. 
Latest completed on the 18th. It's the 19th now (1533 UTC) and both 
http://pkg0.nyi.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:aarch64/latest/meta.txz
and http://pkg0.fra.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:aarch64/latest/meta.txz are dated
02 Nov. How long would you expect it to take for pkgs to be distributed?

>The relative offsets in timing need not be stable over time.
>But having a range of days with weeks between the quarterly
>and default (a.k.a. latest) most-recent builds of
>140releng-arm64 is perfectly normal.

I'm with you WRT days, and also days or weeks WRT quarterly lagging
latest - but weeks where latest lags quarterly?

Maybe my idea/usage of the terms 'quarterly' and 'latest' are different
to FreeBSD's. 

In terms of time, my usage of 'quarterly' means 'about every
three months'. So I'd think it reasonable to think that, in the context,
'quarterly' would mean a datestamp from now to three months ago.
But never more than a few days more recent than latest, unless there was a 
problem in building or distributing packages. I thought there might be a problem,
hence the original email.

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