Auto-saving distfiles on freebsd

[cpghost]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:51:10 +0200
Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> cpghost wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:47:04PM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >> Another problem with ports is that all of them like pulling the
> >> original source from the author's site.  I've had a few where the
> >> author released the code under GPL then a few years later lost
> >> interest, stopped paying whatever ISP he had the main site for
> >> the program at, and the porter also lost interest in the project
> >> and never bothered obtaining the last available tarfile from
> >> the authors site and uploading it to freebsd, then both
> >> disappeared. Another one I can recall is the gated code, similar
> >> issue.
> > 
> > Why not add this to pointyhat scripts? Just upload a copy of every
> > *new* distfile ever encountered from the author's page to freebsd
> > (unless there are legal constraints not to do so, of course)?
> 
> We've regularly collected and published port distfiles for at least a 
> decade (with increasingly higher frequency as disk space came to 
> permit).  It may come as no surprise that Ted is talking out of his
> ass again :)
> 
> Kris

Ah, thanks! Good to know, and it's good news! :)

Will distfiles for ports that are no longer in the tree
remain there as well, so that these ports can still be
compiled with an older ports tree (yes, I know about the
hairy security and dependency issues involved with old
unmaintained and even dead ports...)?

Thanks,
-cpghost.

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