CheriBSD is a fork of FreeBSD to support the CHERI research CPU. We have extended the kernel to provide support for CHERI memory capabilities as well as modifying applications and libraries including tcpdump, libmagic, and libz to take advantage of these capabilities for improved memory safety and compartmentalization. We have also developed custom demo applications and deployment infrastructure for our table demo platform. In this talk I will discuss the challenges facing a long running, public fork of FreeBSD. The challenges I discuss will include keeping up with current, our migration from Perforce to Git and the difficulty--and value--of upstreaming improvements. I will also cover our internal and external release process and the products we produce. CheriBSD targets a research environment, but lessons learned will apply to many environments building products or services on customized versions of FreeBSD.