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Date:      Thu, 4 Jan 2024 02:51:54 +0100 (CET)
From:      henrichhartzer@tuta.io
To:        Freebsd Ports <freebsd-ports@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Latest and quarterly best practices
Message-ID:  <NnH9ree--3-9@tuta.io>

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Hi,

I'm not a committer so this shouldn't carry much weight. Just wanted to exp=
ress my opinion.

I think the latest and quarterly setup is a nice and clever one. Unfortunat=
ely, it seems fairly often that ports that should probably be cherrypicked =
into quarterly are not. Occasionally, some updates make it into quarterly t=
hat 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 (s=
emver) and the changes are non-breaking, it should be cherry picked into qu=
arterly. Especially if this is only a patch level change and not a minor, b=
ut 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 m=
ore familiar with.

net-p2p/monero-cli was updated from 0.18.2.2_2 to=C2=A00.18.3.1 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=C2=A00.18.2.=
2_2 (although 2023Q1 will be cut soon, I assume) which is quite out of date=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=C2=A00.34.0, and cherrypicked to quar=
terly. There were a number of changes in this release, and I personally wou=
ld be hesitant to recommend such a cherrypicking unless there were known is=
sues 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 wou=
ld make the most sense. Now in this case I don't know the context and cherr=
ypicking 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 contri=
bute how I can and it seems like the processes around cherrypicking could b=
e improved. I love FreeBSD and appreciate the tremendous amount of work tha=
t 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



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