[FreeBSD-Ports-Announce] ACTION REQUIRED - Unstaged Ports being DEPRECATED on June 31st.

Bryan Drewery bdrewery at FreeBSD.org
Sat May 10 15:34:34 UTC 2014


You are receiving this mail as it affects FreeBSD ports that you maintain.

In September 2013, the Ports framework learned how to Stage ports.

On June 31st, all unstaged ports will be marked DEPRECATED and have
their MAINTAINER reset.
On August 31st, all unstaged ports will be removed from the ports tree.

Read on for more details.


Staging is when the port installs into the work directory instead of
into /. From here a package can be created without ever installing into
/ and often as a user without root. This also gives us abilities to
improve quality of packages and opens up opportunities for sub-packages
in the future. With staging we have had the ability to add in-tree
testing of plists which in the past required a tool such as porttools,
Tinderbox or Poudriere.

A guide for converting your port to Staging can be found at:

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/ports/StageDir

Staging is also mentioned throughout the Porters Handbook.

You can test your plist with:

  Add DEVELOPER=yes to /etc/make.conf
  # make stage
  # make check-plist

However, Poudriere should be used to test staging conversions as it is
much more strict than the in-tree checks currently. It will detect if
something installs outside of the STAGEDIR. Poudriere 3.0.16 (just
released) should be used for this testing, or the latest -devel version.

Out of the more than 24,000 ports there remains 4,170 ports not yet
staged. Staging is not optional. We must have all staged to progress
with the framework, new features, and automated testing.

We recently granted blanket approval to committers to stage ports
without maintainer approval and then also blocked updates to unstaged
ports in the hopes that this would force more ports to be converted.

However with so many ports remaining unstaged at this point it is
unknown if these ports are actually being maintained.

So we will be DEPRECATING and resetting maintainer on all unstaged ports
on June 31st.

These ports will be set to EXPIRE on August 31st and will then be
removed from the tree. They will not be restored unless someone stages
them as well.

This decision was not easy, but if a port is not being staged after
almost a year, we wonder if the ports are actually maintained and
updated for releases and security issues.

If you have an unstaged port you will begin to receive email
notifications informing you of this until it is staged or maintainer is
reset.

If you have a port that is unstaged, please stage it. If you do not have
interest in maintaining it anymore then please release it.

If you are using ports that are not staged please step up and send a PR
today to stage the port and keep it.

A guide for submitting patches is here:


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/porting-submitting.html

If you already have PR needing to be committed please let us know and we
will try to get on them ASAP.

-- 
Regards,
Bryan Drewery
on behalf of portmgr

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