The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that February 28 was the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 7.4 RELEASE and the FreeBSD 7.x STABLE branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A tag has be created for users who cannot upgrade for some reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest ports repository and use the RELEASE_7_EOL tag instead.

Read more at http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports-announce/2013-March/000051.html

Mark Linimon, aka linimon@,  recently stepped down from his duties on the FreeBSD Ports Management Team.

Mark joined the team back in 2004, providing nine years of continuity to the Ports Infrastructure.  Among the many things Mark did, was maintaining and documenting the current portbuild system that the team uses for -exp runs and package building.  With his other bugbuster@ hat on, he played middle man contacting maintainers of BROKEN and DEPRECATED ports.

On behalf of the Ports Management team, we would like to thank Mark for his many years of service and dedication, his contributions will be greatly missed.

Thomas

on behalf of portmgr@

Just to make it officially official, the ports feature freeze has been lifted.

Ports committers are now entitled to perform sweeping commits. Keep in mind that -exp runs are always a good idea if you think there is a significant change to the ports tree.

And just remember, PLEASE TRY TO NOT BREAK THE INDEX!

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

The FreeBSD Ports Management team is pleased to welcome Bernhard Froelich, aka decke@, to it’s ranks.

Bernhard was a long time ports contributor, and received his ports commit bit back in March 2010.

More recently, Bernhard was the one responsible for bringing us Redports.org shared tinderbox.

Please join me in welcoming decke@ to the team.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

It was recently posted on, http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/2012/09/01/change-to-the-header-in-ports-makefiles/ that we would adopt a new header for the ports Makefiles. The initial discussion seemed to show enough support for the idea of completely stripping the header, leaving only the $FreeBSD$ tag. After the announcement was made, more people stated strong feelings that when and where possible attribution be maintained in the header.

A private discussion was held among ports committers, and while opinions were as varied as the individuals who shared them, it was decided to unify on a two line header.

# Created by: J.Q. Public <[email protected]>
# $FreeBSD$

The Whom line from the classic six line header becomes Created By.

Sometimes, as a result of a repocopy, or changed maintainership, the Created By and MAINTAINER is no longer in synchronisation. To avoid confusion, the first line can be removed, optionally leaving us with a one line header.

# $FreeBSD$

Removing the line of attribution is to be done only at the consent/request of the original contributor.

As before, we ask this header only be updated in conjunction with a regular update, as we do not want any unnecessary churn to the repo prior to the pending Ports Feature Freeze.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

An idea has been floating around for some time, and it was brought up again on the ports@ mailing list recently, please remove the extraneous header information from the Makefile, leaving only the $FreeBSD$ id on the first line.

It is an idea that is long overdue, so from now on, the other fives lines shall be removed.

We do request that this be done sparingly in the short term, as we do not want to cause any additional churn on the repo as we approach our upcoming Ports Feature Freeze, still tentatively scheduled for September 7.

So please proceed only on existing updates. Please do not do any sweeping commits until we have the ports tree stablised post 9.1 tagging. Also bear in mind that Redports/QAT queues a job for every change done to a Makefile, we do not want to overburden the QAT at this time. It is important to allow this service to run at peek efficiency at this time to ensure it’s full potential as we approach the upcoming Feature Freeze.

The new look of the Makefile has been document in the Porter’s Handbook.

The next item on the todo list is to update devel/newfile for those that do a port create.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

Florent Thoumie, aka flz@, recently stepped down from his roll on the FreeBSD Ports Management team.

Florent started on portmgr back in August 2008, being instrumental in maintaining the legacy pkg_* code plus other aspects of the ports infrastructure, including but not limited to the unifying of the code base for the ports build system.

On behalf of the Ports Management team, we want to thank Florent for his years of service, he will be missed.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

The FreeBSD 9.1 schedule has been published, http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/schedule.html. Historically we have done a Feature Freeze at RC1, we are going to try do it with RC2 this time, tentatively scheduled for August 3, subject to schedule slippage.

At the time the the Release Engineering team announces RC2 is ready, we will then enforce “Feature Safe” commits only. This means no sweeping changes will be allowed, see http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/implementation.html#sweeping_changes

Once portmgr@ is satisfied that the requisite packages are built to ship with FreeBSD 9.1, the ports tree will be re-opened for business.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr

The FreeBSD ports tree will migrate from CVS to Subversion soon. The anticipated date for the migration is July 14th. This will have no impact for ports tree users as there will be a SVN to CVS exporter.

Please note that cvsup will still work after the migration. Nevertheless c(v)sup is pretty dated so you may want to see if portsnap(8) will fit your needs.

Beat and Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

FreeBSD 8.3 RC1 has been pulicly announced, it is now time for the the
Ports Feature Freeze.

Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches
will be allowed without prior approval, but with the extra

Feature safe: yes

tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a
large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with
unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires
the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit
approval from portmgr@ after that date.

Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@

The FreeBSD 8.3 release process is under way, you can view the schedule,
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/8.3TODO.

As has become the custom, a ports feature freeze is anticipated to be
announced with the RC1 date, tentatively scheduled at this time
for March 2, 2012. Watch for further announcements as we get closer.

During the feature freeze, committers are expected to be conservative with
their commits, that is, no sweeping commits, infrastructure changes, or
commits to ports with a high number of dependencies.