2025-12-23 Understanding more about the pkg-status service for FreeBSD
If you're interested in porting software for FreeBSD and not afraid to jump into code aspect then keeping the FreeBSD Porters Handbook on your bookmark list. This explains many of the mechanics and the actual on the ground work for packaging up a port for FreeBSD. Note that there is copious amount of documentation for FreeBSD such that it can be daunting for a newcomer to FreeBSD to sort it out all. If you're just starting to USE FreeBSD, I think you can't go wrong with going to the FreeBSD Handbook which focuses on using FreeBSD rather than developing or packaging software for FreeBSD.
Assuming you've got a port submitted and want to continue to maintain it. At some point you might learn about the pkg-fallout report. The FreeBSD project runs continuous builds (the other more modern term is CI) to periodically check that the ported software can still build and reports are generated from that. Note that this information is located here in the Committer's Guide rather than the Porters Handbook (as I originally assumed).
If you hear from pkg-fallout one of the sites you might stumble across is https://pkg-status.freebsd.org/ which has (extensive) information on ports builds for FreeBSD. Decoding all the information for pkg-status is pretty daunting for newcomers to this service. One thing I noticed is there is a Type field for the different types of builds which are labeled:
exp
package
qat
After staring at that for awhile, I tried to find some documentation that explained how to make sense of the interface and came across this guide that was helpful in understanding a little more. Unfortunately, not much information regarding the Type. After puzzling for awhile, my guess is that they mean the following (could be wrong):
exp - Experimental
package - Package builds
qat - Quarterly package builds