Compatibility Between Releases Policy

[Erik Norgaard]

Jason C. Wells wrote:

> Ports astonish me more often than FreeBSD to be sure.  If one uses a 
> port that was built on a 6.0 system, can one trust that no bit rot will 
> occur by the time 6.9 rolls around.  Will all of FreeBSDs interfaces and 
> features remain backward compatible?  While the developer community 
> might employee POLA in this regard, this sure seems like the kind of 
> policy issue that would be written into our release engineering 
> documents.  (I couldn't find it.)

Looks like you want to read this:

   http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/policies.html

POLA is an ideal, it may be necessary to violate POLA for example for 
security reasons, and you may have system upgrades that will require 
rebuild of ports too - recently a bug in openssl required a rebuild of 
world - and I assume any ports built against the base' openssl.

I don't understand your concern, if you upgrade the base system wouldn't 
it be time to check your ports too? If you insist just don't update your 
ports tree, that should keep it working with the same versions of ports 
although you may have to rebuild individual ports.

I find it easier to adapt continuously to small astonishments :)

Cheers, Erik
-- 
Ph: +34.666334818                      web: http://www.locolomo.org
X.509 Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/8D03551FFCE04F0C.crt
Key ID: 69:79:B8:2C:E3:8F:E7:BE:5D:C3:C3:B1:74:62:B8:3F:9F:1F:69:B9