The ports tree has in recent years become a lot more aggressive in removing older version (and abandoned) software that still 'works'. That's fine, the tech world of today is moving faster and faster and the longevity of software has been decreasing dramatically. Whether that's good or bad in the long run, we have yet to see the consequences of that.
Anyway, I think there would be a benefit to preserve quarterly snapshots of the
pre-built package repositories for at least a few years or decades for the final major version of each FreeBSD release going forward (ie. 13, 14, etc...). Given that FreeBSD jails are often used to run older versions of software (and the OS) due to specific needs that prevent an immediate upgrade/modernization path.
PHP is an excellent example.
While Git/SVN will retain the port Makefiles, it's not always going to be possible to manually re-build the needed packages. Either the destination hardware is too under-powered, or the source dist files are gone.
I understand costs are involved, but I don't believe they would be too significant if they are moved to lower powered infrastructure with less demanding uptime requirements.
Just my 2 cents...
To build PHP 7.4 with Poudriere for 13.2:
Assuming you already have it setup:
https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/wiki/pkg_repos
Code:
poudriere jail -c -j 13amd64 -v 13.2-RELEASE -a amd64
poudriere ports -c -p 2022Q4 -m git+http -U https://git.freebsd.org/ports.git -B 2022Q4
poudriere bulk -p 2022Q4 -j 13amd64 -z php74 lang/php74 www/mod_php74 lang/php74-extensions