mail/roundcube (bsd.php.mk broken?)

[Miroslav Lachman]

Mike Jakubik wrote on 03/24/2016 17:11:
> On 2016-03-23 09:33 PM, Guido Falsi wrote:
>> On 03/24/16 01:56, Mike Jakubik wrote:
>>> On 2016-03-23 08:42 PM, Guido Falsi wrote:
>>>> On 03/24/16 01:09, Mike Jakubik wrote:
>>>
>>>>> ports tree. I guess i can try upgrading to 5.5 and hope that my
>>>>> applications are compatible with it. Sigh, FreeBSD has become a PITA
>>>>> lately to maintain unless everything installed is bleeding edge. In
>>>>> any
>>>>> case, thanks for the help.
>>>>
>>>> Sorry I beg to disagree.
>>>>
>>>> php 5.4 is unsupported upstream, and 5.5 will EOL in a few months. You
>>>> should complain to the php project about this, not the ports tree,
>>>> which
>>>> is just complying with upstream.
>>>
>>> You are correct, however I think php is a special case, because it's a
>>> slow adopter, sadly a lot of hosting providers have not updated and a
>>> lot of software is still not compatible with the latest versions. For
>>> example, the default version of php in CentOS 7 is still 5.4, so I don't
>>> see why removing it from ports was a good idea.
>>>
>>
>> The reason is it is not supported, bugs and vulnerabilities are not
>> fixed, we would end up giving potentially insecure software, or even
>> worse, software with known vulnerabilities.
>
> I get what you are saying, but I think these kind of changes could be
> handled better. You go to update something and shit breaks or you get
> some incomprehensible errors such as in this case forcing you to rummage
> through some UPDATING file or mailing lists. What ever happened to POLA?
> Why couldn't it have prompted me upon trying to perform a minor update
> of roundcube that my version of PHP is no longer supported, and perhaps
> give me an option to continue anyways at my own risk since it works just
> fine with the php i have installed. Now i have to manually reinstall all
> the php packages and binaries that depend on them and hope that my php
> software will still function with the new php. That is why i say that
> FreeBSD is a PITA to maintain.

You should read UPDATING before each update / upgrade and you can use 
'pkg updating' command for it.

Ports are constantly moving. Almost every minute there is some changes 
in ports (dependencies of another ports), ports framework, pkg util etc. 
It is not easy to maintain huge ports with so many dependencies like PHP 
and if nobody watns to maintain it, then it must be removed. PHP 5.3 was 
adopted by another maintainer and kept alive for about year after being 
discontinued upstream but nobody steped in to do this for PHP 5.4.
There are about 25 000 ports and each must have somebody to maintain it. 
There is no reason to have dead unmaintained ports in a tree. When I 
wanted to resurrect removed port pnm2ppa I must become a maintainer - 
and that's right.

Miroslav Lachman