ports deprecations (was: sysutils/cfs)

Chad Perrin code at apotheon.net
Sat Sep 10 16:31:45 UTC 2011


On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 12:24:33PM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> 
> The open question is, is there a point in marking a point DEPRECATED
> without giving an expiration date.  My personal answer is "no" because
> no-one will believe in a DEPRECATED tag without EXPIRATION_DATE and
> people will be disappointed because they've grown used to custom and
> practice and I can already see the "we told you it was DEPRECATED".
> 
> The real point is that the FreeBSD ports system can not fill in for the
> maintainers of discontinued ports.
> 
> There is a certain pragmatism to "as long as it builds, appears to work,
> and there are no known critical bugs, let's keep it", but it has this
> organizational drawback that it becomes custom and practice at some
> time, and ends up hurting more people in the end.

Maybe DEPRECATED is the wrong term for something that builds and works
but has no maintainer, then.  Maybe the term for it should be something
like UNMAINTAINED or ABANDONED.  That way, the message conveyed to the
user is "This appears to work for now, and there are still using it, so
we aren't going to make it exceedingly difficult to install on new
deployments where people feel a need for it or want to maintain
compatibility with other systems.  There is no guarantee it will work in
six months, though.  Use at your own risk.  If someone wants to start
maintaining it, now is the time."

I think part of the problem with the disagreements in this discussion is
that everyone is focused on whether something builds, whether it has an
obscure vulnerability that only affects particular use cases, and whether
there is an upstream maintainer.  Meanwhile, nobody seems to be
discussing whether anyone uses it.

I used a window manager in FreeBSD for about five years that had not
upstream maintainer, because while the creator still maintained the
codebase on his Website he no longer used it himself and never put any
time into upkeep.  Luckily, it was stable, had no known vulnerabilities,
and did not appear to need any feature additions, either.  It was my
favorite window manager during that entire time and, though I've moved on
early this year, the switch to a new window manager turns out to be a bit
of a trade-off rather than a clear improvement -- but a trade-off that I
think suits my current needs.

No, I won't tell you which window manager, because if I want to use it
again I don't want to discover that calling it to the minds of some of
the ports people caused it to be deleted.

Anyway, my point is that someone was *using* it, and quite liked it.  If
something is stable and secure and has an active maintainer, but nobody
in the world uses it (or is likely to use it) other than that maintainer,
it probably doesn't matter if it gets deleted from ports.  If it has no
upstream maintainer, but still builds, appears to be secure for pretty
much every use case, and there are hundreds of users, deleting it is
likely to make a lot of people unhappy.

The problem with that, of course, is that it can be very difficult to
measure actual users.  I just don't think we should lose sight of the
fact that should be regarded as one of the most important factors in
determining whether a given port should exist.  If enough people want it,
a maintainer will probably appear eventually, even if it's not in the
next few weeks, after all.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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