The truth about net-im/ymessenger
Eric P. Scott
eps+pbug0611 at ana.com
Wed Nov 22 20:03:23 PST 2006
It's been deprecated under somewhat false pretenses. :-)
The current port is set to IGNORE, claiming [it] "is a dynamically
linked binary linked to old version of gtkhtml no longer in ports."
PR# 91491 alleged "The Yahoo! messenger port doesn't work on
FreeBSD-4.11," and submitted what I consider a bad patch:
deliberately breaking things for FreeBSD 4.x users by "upgrading"
to a 5.x build, without providing appropriate conditionals for
4.x users. That was a mistake...
It turns out that on a FreeBSD 4.11 machine, updated to
4.11-SECURITY, with the latest ports and packages installed, the
"old" ymessenger port (20020902) is still "good." There's just a
small "gotcha."
It seems, somewhere along the line, a couple of shared libraries
were renamed. This typically merits a fairly inconspicuous
mention in /usr/ports/UPDATING, instructing users to relink
everything affected. Of course, that's not exactly helpful
advice when you're dealing with a binary port. It turns out a
simple libmap.conf file is all it took to bring a "dead" FreeBSD
4.5(?) executable back to life:
# /etc/libmap.conf
#
# candidate mapping
#
[/usr/local/libexec/ymessenger/ymessenger.bin]
libgdk12.so.2 libgdk-12.so.2
libglib12.so.3 libglib-12.so.3
libgmodule12.so.3 libgmodule-12.so.3
libgtk12.so.2 libgtk-12.so.2
The only reason this port should be allowed to die is there's
an unfortunate bug in this version: your friends will always
appear to be offline. It's fixed in 1.0.6.1--which was only
released for Linux. While net-im/linux-ymessenger has a few
"rough edges," it works well enough to be usable.
The next time someone claims a port should be marked BROKEN
merely because something "doesn't work" (or doesn't compile on
4.x), apply a little skepticism. It's often due to something
fairly trivial. The Porter's Handbook doesn't adequately address
this, but there are some important and extremely relevant notes
in the FreeBSD Wiki.
-=EPS=-
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