Re: Latest and quarterly best practices

Hi Ronald and all,

Sorry for the wait on this. I didn't mean to stir up any controversy. I think the general guidelines are good. I have requested many times that a particular package update be backported into quarterly. I was mainly just hoping to put this out in the open so more people might think about it.

Jan, you are absolutely right about hyprland. I was trying to come up with a negative example of why someone might not want to update quarterly right away, but it was a bad example indeed.

Thanks for the discussion here. I appreciate all of the replies.

Henrich

Jan 5, 2024, 07:44 by ronald-lists@klop.ws:

>
>
> Van:>  henrichhartzer@tuta.io
> Datum:>  4 januari 2024 02:52
> Aan:>  Freebsd Ports <freebsd-ports@freebsd.org>
> Onderwerp:>  Latest and quarterly best practices
>
>> Hi,
>>  
>>  I'm not a committer so this shouldn't carry much weight. Just wanted to express my opinion.
>>  
>>  I think the latest and quarterly setup is a nice and clever one. Unfortunately, it seems fairly often that ports that should probably be cherrypicked into quarterly are not. Occasionally, some updates make it into quarterly that don't make clear sense to me, but this is much more rare.
>>  
>>  I propose that as a rule of thumb, if a package uses Semantic Versioning (semver) and the changes are non-breaking, it should be cherry picked into quarterly. Especially if this is only a patch level change and not a minor, but likely either way.
>>  
>>  A couple of recent examples that I've seen, which I would like to point out Please note that I am *not* picking on anyone and this is just what I'm more familiar with.
>>  
>>  net-p2p/monero-cli was updated from 0.18.2.2_2 to 0.18.3.1 on the 19th of October. Any software that is blockchain related tends to need to be as current as possible for security reasons. Quarterly still has 0.18.2.2_2 (although 2023Q1 will be cut soon, I assume) which is quite out of date now.
>>  
>>  An opposite case, and this one may be truly a no harm no foul case: x11-wm/hyprland was updated from 0.33.1_2 to 0.34.0, and cherrypicked to quarterly. There were a number of changes in this release, and I personally would be hesitant to recommend such a cherrypicking unless there were known issues with 0.33.1 that users had complained about. Otherwise, since it's an offline window manager, it seems like waiting for the quarterly release would make the most sense. Now in this case I don't know the context and cherrypicking may have made complete sense -- I'm just using it as an example to try and explain my thoughts.
>>  
>>  Please don't feel at all like I'm being nitpicky. I'm just hoping to contribute how I can and it seems like the processes around cherrypicking could be improved. I love FreeBSD and appreciate the tremendous amount of work that has gone into it. It really is great because of the contributions of many I'm just hoping to make it even greater!
>>  
>>  Thank you for reading, and Happy New Year!
>>  
>>  Sincerely,
>>  Henrich
>>
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for your ideas.
>
> There are some guidelines to this.
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ports/QuarterlyBranch
>
> But it is not a “process” as in somebody is responsible for this. It is mostly up to the maintainer of the port to cherry-pick.
>
> So if you miss something in a Q branch I think it is fastest to:
> 1- contact the maintainer of the port by mail or PR.
> 2- contact this ports mailing list.
>
> Does this resolve anything of your thoughts?
>
> Regards,
> Ronald.
>
>