Herve Quiroz recently asked on the freebsd-stable mailing list why the XFree86 4.2 port was no longer available for FreeBSD.

Amidst the resulting discussion, Kevin Oberman explained that it was being redistributed as a meta-port, offering the advantage of being upgraded in pieces. Due to the extremely large size of XFree86, it lends itself well to this strategy.

Additionally, the XFree86 4.2 port was too new and thus insufficiently tested for inclusion in the FreeBSD 4.5 release.

From: Herve Quiroz
To: freebsd-stable AT FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: XFree86 4.2
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 11:03:44 +0100 (CET)

I have not been member of this list until recently so I have probably
missed some discussion on the topic. Anyway, what is going on with Xfree86
v4.2 ? I once had seen XFree86 4.2 on freshports.org but then it came back
to 4.1 few days later...

NetBSD has already 4.2 in -stable so why not FreeBSD ?

Herv