PORTREVISION is a monotonically increasing value which is reset to 0 with every increase of PORTVERSION, typically every time there is a new official vendor release. If PORTREVISION is non-zero, the value is appended to the package name. Changes to PORTREVISION are used by automated tools like pkg-version(8) to determine that a new package is available.

PORTREVISION must be increased each time a change is made to the port that changes the generated package in any way. That includes changes that only affect a package built with non-default options.

Examples of when PORTREVISION must be bumped:

Examples of changes which do not require a PORTREVISION bump:

A rule of thumb is to decide whether a change committed to a port is something which some people would benefit from having. Either because of an enhancement, fix, or by virtue that the new package will actually work at all. Then weigh that against that fact that it will cause everyone who regularly updates their ports tree to be compelled to update. If yes, PORTREVISION must be bumped.

From time to time a software vendor or FreeBSD porter will do something silly and release a version of their software which is actually numerically less than the previous version. An example of this is a port which goes from foo-20000801 to foo-1.0 (the former will be incorrectly treated as a newer version since 20000801 is a numerically greater value than 1).

% pkg version -t 0.031 0.29
	    >

In situations such as this, PORTEPOCH must be increased. If PORTEPOCH is nonzero it is appended to the package name as described in section 0 above. PORTEPOCH must never be decreased or reset to zero, because that would cause comparison to a package from an earlier epoch to fail. For example, the package would not be detected as out of date. The new version number, 1.0,1 in the above example, is still numerically less than the previous version, 20000801, but the ,1 suffix is treated specially by automated tools and found to be greater than the implied suffix ,0 on the earlier package.

Dropping or resetting PORTEPOCH incorrectly leads to no end of grief. If the discussion above was not clear enough, please consult the FreeBSD ports mailing list.

It is expected that PORTEPOCH will not be used for the majority of ports, and that sensible use of PORTVERSION can often preempt it becoming necessary if a future release of the software changes the version structure. However, care is needed by FreeBSD porters when a vendor release is made without an official version number — such as a code “snapshot” release. The temptation is to label the release with the release date, which will cause problems as in the example above when a new “official” release is made.

For example, if a snapshot release is made on the date 20000917, and the previous version of the software was version 1.2, do not use 20000917 for PORTVERSION. The correct way is a PORTVERSION of 1.2.20000917, or similar, so that the succeeding release, say 1.3, is still a numerically greater value.

The gtkmumble port, version 0.10, is committed to the ports collection:

PORTNAME=	gtkmumble
PORTVERSION=	0.10

PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10.

A security hole is discovered which requires a local FreeBSD patch. PORTREVISION is bumped accordingly.

PORTNAME=	gtkmumble
PORTVERSION=	0.10
PORTREVISION=	1

PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.10_1

A new version is released by the vendor, numbered 0.2 (it turns out the author actually intended 0.10 to actually mean 0.1.0, not “what comes after 0.9” - oops, too late now). Since the new minor version 2 is numerically less than the previous version 10, PORTEPOCH must be bumped to manually force the new package to be detected as “newer”. Since it is a new vendor release of the code, PORTREVISION is reset to 0 (or removed from the Makefile).

PORTNAME=	gtkmumble
PORTVERSION=	0.2
PORTEPOCH=	1

PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.2,1

The next release is 0.3. Since PORTEPOCH never decreases, the version variables are now:

PORTNAME=	gtkmumble
PORTVERSION=	0.3
PORTEPOCH=	1

PKGNAME becomes gtkmumble-0.3,1