Google Code as an upstream is gone

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 9:57 AM, Christian Weisgerber <naddy at mips.inka.de>
wrote:

> Mathieu Arnold:
>
> > If the software has not been moved to some other place, (it takes about
> > 30 seconds to click the automatic migration to github thing, and it is
> > usually done within the hour,) since march 2015, it is most likely
> > abandoned and should not be kept in the ports tree.
>
> That's a bold new policy.
>
> In the past, if the upstream was gone and the maintainer judged the
> software still useful (at their discretion, not based on a cut-off
> date), they would even fall back to providing the distfile at
> people.freebsd.org.
>
> So, will this be enforced?  Will somebody go through all distfiles,
> check the time stamps in the tarballs, and mark ports as BROKEN if
> the distfile hasn't been updated since... when exactly?  I guess I
> could to that.
>
> --
> Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de
>

This was simply a terrible idea and I would hope that the ports team would
clearly so state and back out the "BROKEN" from those ports. As others are
pointing out, lot of very old and stable code has gone over a year without
updating.

One case of import to me was mp4v2, a library for making MP4v2 formatted
files. It's not terribly old, though there has been little recent
development. The code was move to github, though it is unclear if this was
official, whatever that might mean in this context. This is code that I use
quite often as a part of faac (audio encoder) and avidemux (simple video
editor and format converter). As far as I know, there is no other open
source library for version 2 of the MP4 spec. Yet, because it had Google
Code as it's repo and had not been updated in just over a year, BROKEN.
(That has now been fixed sue to several people yelling loudly about its
import.

I am sure that ports contains many old, buggy, insecure ports that should
go away, but a standard of "over  year without a commit" should not be a
metric for determining what goes away.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683