FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[vermaden]

A simple sollution (at least for a start), for backporting
various bugfixes from STABLE to RELEASE.

Currently we have /var/db/pkg 'db' for installed ports,
where an installed port is like /var/db/pkg/portname-1.0
lets provide another one, /var/db/patch, a separated
'repository' that would list installed patches/backports
from STABLE to RELEASE, for example:

# pkg_info
aspell-0.60.6.1     Spelling checker with better suggestion logic than
ispell
automake-1.11.1     GNU Standards-compliant Makefile generator (1.11)
binutils-2.22       GNU binary tools
bison-2.4.3,1       A parser generator from FSF, (mostly) compatible with
Yacc
blogbench-1.1       Performance Test of Filesystem I/O
(...)

# patch_into
network-intel_drivers-em-1.0   Some fancy descritpion here
usb-hubfix-3.0                 Some other fancy descritpion

Similar for patch_add(1)/patch_delete(1) etc.

LOGIC/THEORY:

Adding a PATCH network-intel_drivers-em-1.0 would first move all
files that will be overwritten to /var/db/patch/files, for example
/boot/kernel/if_em.ko to
/var/db/patch/files/network-intel_drivers-em-1.0/boot/kernel/if_em.ko
and then install the new backported/updatet files into the base system
or should I say RELEASE.

The only other thing needed to do is to make freebsd-update AWARE of
the files that are under /var/db/patch/files/*/ to omit them when
checking the checksums for updating process.

I will not write that as I only know basics of C programming
and creating this in SH and then porting it to C seems useless
efort to me.

Regards,
vermaden