quarterly is the familiar name for:

• ports branched from main at the beginning of every January, April, July, and October
• the binary package sets that are produced from the most recent quarterly branch.

Each quarterly branch is named according to the year (YYYY) and quarter (Q1-4) of its creation.

A user experience (UX), for port and package installations and upgrades, that is more predictable and stable than the UX for the more dynamic main branch (familiarly: latest).

In essence, changes are limited to:

• non-feature updates.

quarterly is the default for FreeBSD-RELEASE versions 10.2-RELEASE and later.

Ports Management Team (portmgr)

Receive, on a best effort basis, merge (cherry-pick -x) commits including, but not limited to:

• Security fixes (that may be version updates, or backports of commits)
• Build, run, packaging, or other bug fixes
• Ports compliance/framework changes.

More precisely:

• Any change that is not a version update – unless it is a security update – that, other than the intended change, makes no functional change to the resulting package or software.

Merges from main are limited to the most recent quarterly. Prior branches are not supported; no merges.

The 2023Q4 branch was created in October 2023.

Its commit history can be browsed at:

• https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/log/?h=2023Q4
• https://codeberg.org/FreeBSD/freebsd-ports/commits/branch/2023Q4
• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/commits/2023Q4
• https://gitlab.com/FreeBSD/freebsd-ports/-/commits/2023Q4/.

In Bugzilla:

• open reports that request, or intend, a merge to quarterly.

On a system where /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf does not yet exist:

1. mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
2. echo "FreeBSD: { url: "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/\${ABI}/latest" }" > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
3. pkg upgrade -f to install packages from latest (relatively time-consuming), or pkg update to update the catalogue alone.

Hint: if your system supports ZFS boot environments, create one before the upgrade.