[cyberpunk]

Ports are rolling release. Simply run 'portsnap fetch update' and you'll have the latest available in /usr/ports just one 'portmaster -a' (upgrade) away.

Same goes for packages (pkg), they are rolling release.

No idea where you're getting this 90 days release stuff from :) (Perhaps there's a LTS 'release' for ports? I don't think many people use it if there is. Trust me, you're safe enough with rolling ports).

[just_for_you]

See the following. There's a 'latest' branch and a 'quarterly' branch.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ports/QuarterlyBranch https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:amd64/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/branches/

That said, I don't have any problems with rolling-release. I've ran stuff like openSUSE Tumbleweed for years, and back in my dabbling days, plenty of Gentoo and Arch.

My issue is that for non-personal and longer-term deployments, FreeBSD has never been a contender for me because of having to keep on top of Ports upgrades. For example for a project at work, I wouldn't want to return to a FreeBSD deployment months later to add a feature, and then have to update all my packages on that system.

I understand chances are the upgrades would likely be hitch-free, or would only require a little bit of fixing around, but I still really don't want to hold my breath every 3 months.

[mise_en_place]

As a young SWE interested in IT (which is how I got interested in programming in the first place, was doing sysadmin things as a teenager like running an IRC leaf), older IT wizards told me to never mix ports and packages. And furthermore, not to use ports as they lead to fundamental breakages.