Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:58:01 -0700 From: Charlie Kester <corky1951@comcast.net> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: deprecated ports Message-ID: <20110315215801.GD5349@comcast.net>
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I see there's been another few batch commits deprecating some unmaintained ports where "upstream is gone and/or distfile is no longer available." Maintainers and prospective maintainers should be sure to look at the ports listed in these commits. I don't think much effort was made to check the availability of the distfiles. Instead, it seems that all that was done was to try the MASTER_SITES, etc. from the port Makefiles, and if the fetch failed, onto the list they went. NOTE: I'm NOT saying the committers' procedure was too lazy or anything like that. There are a lot of these broken ports in the tree, and deprecation seems like a reasonable step to take -- especially if the result is to trigger some action from people who want to see these ports retained. I just rescued one of these, sysutils/lookat, that was deprecated a few days ago. I followed the WWW link in the pkg-descr, found that the author's website was still up and that the distfile could still be downloaded -- but the download url had changed. So all the port needed was a tweak to the MASTER_SITES. Today I see that the fairly popular graphics/gimpshop has also been deprecated. Here the WWW link from pkg-descr also fails, but a quick websearch found the new (?) official website for this app: http://www.gimpshop.com, where the distfile is available for download. So here's another one that can be easily rescued. And I'll bet there are more.
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