Building packages takes quite a while, especially for 14-STABLE. The last package build for that branch took 371 hours, around 15-ish days. We currently build installer images and base OS updates every 14 days. This means that the 14-STABLE package builds will always be at least one build behind.

So, we need to slow the cadence of our installer image and base OS update builds. Instead of building installer images and base OS updates bi-weekly, we will move to monthly builds.

This will allow us to, at the start of every month, perform a clean package build. After that initial clean package build completes and is synced, we can then perform incremental package builds for the remainder of the month.

There are still a few potential issues with this. Sometimes, a port gets updated that 20,000+ other ports depend on, effectively meaning that we're doing a clean build even though an incremental build was requested.

If an incremental package build is unable to complete by the time the 1st day of the next month comes around, we will cancel that build in favor of starting the clean build on the 1st.

Slowing the frequency to monthly for the installers and base OS updates also opens up new opportunities for the community to explore. For example, we would welcome generation of .torrent files. Who knows, maybe we could help perform the initial seeding. :-)

These changes will take place on 01 Feb 2024.