PHP version retirement

[Adam Weinberger]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 1:04 AM Martin Waschbüsch <martin at waschbuesch.de> wrote:
> >>>> Furthermore, the argument that it is more more work to maintain an abandoned version is silly because it’s more work to delete a port that to just keep it in the tree for a while longer.
> >>>
> >>> That last part isn't correct. The work of deleting the ports is
> >>> largely automated and simple, and it will always happen eventually.
> >>> The work involved is in supporting unsupported versions. Our php team
> >>> is spread very thin, and they simply cannot support php versions
> >>> outside of upstream development. There are no resources to backport
> >>> fixes that may or may not be designed to work with older versions
> >>
> >> I do not understand this. At all.
> >> And I sort of hope I misunderstood you, because it sounds like you think a maintainer is or may be regarded as someone who can be expected to provide product support of some kind?
> >> I find that notion worrying to say the least.
> >
> > If you believe that handling updates, analyzing submitted and upstream
> > patches and development, and answering a bevy of questions for every
> > major update is effortless, then you drastically underestimate the
> > amount of work that goes into the ports tree.
>
> You completely misunderstand me.
> I know there is a lot of effort going into this. I disagree only in that I do not believe there should be any expectations towards maintainers.
> It is voluntary work. Spare time, etc. I am grateful for the effort people put into this, but I strongly believe no one should act towards volunteers with any expectations as to what they should do, how much time they spend, etc.
>
> So, I find it wrong to say, as I understood you, to remove a package from the ports tree because otherwise others people, for instance users of FreeBSD, would have the *expectation* of receiving support for those packages.
> That perception of any kind of entitlement towards volunteers is wrong, IMHO.
>
> And that is why I answered that part of your message because it is not (for reasons stated above) a valid argument against having outdated software in the ports tree.

Ah! You're right, I did completely misunderstand you.

You're correct that we don't provide any semblance of support for the
upstream software. Absolutely, and under no circumstances should
anyone have to.

I'm referring to support of the port itself. Maintainership requires
responding to private emails asking for help; evaluating, testing, and
approving submitted patches; responding to PRs about changes or fixes
or poor behaviour (90% of the time related to portmaster); responding
to error reports; and so on.

We do expect those things from maintainers, because those are what are
required to keep the ports tree running. And we actively drop
maintainership from ports where maintainers routinely ignore those
responsibilities, regardless of whether they have a commit bit.

As decke noted, maintainership of a small port with relatively low
deployment is pretty smooth (and don't get me wrong, they're as or
more important than the big packages). But a huge and complex
framework like php is a massive undertaking, with a near-constant
barrage of complex patches that require highly complex testing
strategies, and thousands of dependent ports to worry about for every
change.

I suggested that it might be possible for stale languages to remain in
the tree, as long as the above support wasn't required or expected.
But, honestly, Franco's response mocking the offer made my desire to
help him somewhere at or below zero, and has pretty much ensured that
nobody else in portmgr is going to be eager to get skin in the game.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org