Ports Repository Freeze

22 July, 2026 by kevans@FreeBSD.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

You may have noticed that the ports repository has been frozen for nearly 24
hours now, at the time of writing.  Our statement regarding the situation and
next steps follows.

A 150MB binary file was recently committed to the ports tree and, as a result,
core@ made the decision to implement a temporary freeze of the ports tree in
order to implement some clean up efforts.  The commit in question severed our
ports tree mirroring to github.com due to their filesize hard limit of 100MB,
and introduced a blob of questionable licensing into the repository history.

Given the importance of github.com mirroring to our community, we are actively
taking steps to remove the offending commits and restore mirroring to the
external services.  There is no concern that the ports tree has been
compromised.  The freeze was entirely intended to limit the number of commits
that will need to be re-written in order to issue a corrected state.

It is important to us that we provide a reproducible and sustainable path for
correcting this issue for the community and downstream consumers.  As you're
well-aware, correcting issues of this nature is not always as straightforward as
desired.

We are actively working on producing instructions which existing checkouts will
need to follow to catch up with these corrections.  To provide total
transparency, we will also provide a procedure for verifying that the official
repository changes enacted are limited to exactly the scope that we claim.

We are also implementing server-side hooks to prevent this from happening in the
future.

Please stay tuned for additional updates from us, and thank you for your time.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans (on behalf of core@)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iJEEARYKADkWIQTOLDfUSTVFb0n/Wd5KG8EPLdVqEwUCamEskBsUgAAAAAAEAA5t
YW51MiwyLjUrMS4xMiwyLDMACgkQShvBDy3VahPO5wEA+60GiOYCdejKOVJzCr5J
fzuEQJxkWt/faQAsa9QlMI8BAMKuUIyRmCqFH99hcoPa4TgvABN3O99J9Mse5U/g
chUI
=QS8j
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

A copy of this message is available independently for verification at:

https://people.freebsd.org/~kevans/core/ports-freeze-20260722.txt.asc