If you ship software for Debian and you've been frustrated that your users get stuck with a lousy version of a dependency, I can understand that.
I've been admining Debian boxes for more than a decade so I'm aware of the drawbacks of its policies. That's why my desktop tracks unstable. But for a sysadmin, freezing everything for long periods of time makes for an enormous reduction in churn-related administration time. Having nothing but security updates to install until the next version comes out 2+ years later is excellent. For the exceptions, pinning can often solve the problem. And if pinning doesn't work, there's always building from source.
Like I said above, I'm new to FreeBSD so I'm not sure how much churn I'll have to endure, but I'm looking forward to finding out.
I understood why you like tracking a security branch as I have been admining *nix boxes for 15+ years.
Where that approach fails is that as a sysadmin one of the responsibilities is to provide good tools to the user, not reduce work for the sysadmin. The user might be a SaaS platform, developers or more traditional (l)users. Regardless, you want your platform to be stable and efficient from a user perspective. Tracking a "Security" branch only give you one of those in many cases.
It's an apples to oranges in some regards because FreeBSD OS patchsets are essentially the "Security" branch while ports is a different issue(and one the user is most likely concerned about).
I've been admining Debian boxes for more than a decade so I'm aware of the drawbacks of its policies. That's why my desktop tracks unstable. But for a sysadmin, freezing everything for long periods of time makes for an enormous reduction in churn-related administration time. Having nothing but security updates to install until the next version comes out 2+ years later is excellent. For the exceptions, pinning can often solve the problem. And if pinning doesn't work, there's always building from source.
Like I said above, I'm new to FreeBSD so I'm not sure how much churn I'll have to endure, but I'm looking forward to finding out.