For poudriere and other automated applications, it'd be useful to have a symbolic ref/branch that points to the latest quarterly ports branch. Otherwise, manual intervention is needed every quarter to point to the latest branch.
I'm not sure I understand this request. An automatically changing ref means that user would be surprise-upgraded to new ports versions four times a year. I was under the impression that the quarterly branches are for folks that don't want that. What's wrong then with just using `main`?
Mmmm, we could have a hook to update a symbolic-ref, it works even when the ref it points to is moved to a new ref, something like: $ git symbolic-ref refs/heads/latest-quarterly refs/heads/2021Q2
I may be misunderstanding the purpose of quarterly. According to https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ports/QuarterlyBranch only the latest quarterly branch receives any updates. So in order to continue receiving security updates to ports, one must always use the latest quarterly branch, and switch as soon as another one is created. This would be facilitated by having a symbolic ref for the latest quarterly branch. I _am_ interested in the 'less-surprises' promise of the quarterly branches, but also do not want to risk missing security updates by forgetting to flip a digit in '202xQy' every three months.
(In reply to Mathieu Arnold from comment #2) This would be my preferred solution.
In practice there commits on the previous quarterly branch stop as soon as the new one is created (perhaps a few linger on during the first day), so the old quarterly branch will freeze in time. People not wanting to update after that point for whatever reason should not run 'pkg upgrade' after that point ;) For other people it is probably a nice service not having to bump the branch pointer each new quarter.
FWIW: gitup supports automatic quarterly branch rollover.
*** Bug 274865 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***