PHP version retirement

[Franco Fichtner]

> On 12. Aug 2019, at 16:29, Adam Weinberger <adamw at adamw.org> wrote:
> 
> 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why I answered that part of your message because it is not (for reasons stated above) a valid argument against having outdated software in the ports tree.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.

Sure, if you feel like that is so there is no need to argue about it. I still feel the latent drift of “php is high profile and low profile is easy” like a sneaky way out of a fruitful discussion ignoring the request made by users: don’t kill software on tight schedules if there is no technical need for it.

Unless you want to state a valid technical reason. For PHP 5.6 removal especially one has to assume that general arguments are merely made up here to fit the general lack of disagreement on the grace period issue.

That’s fine and easier to say you don’t want to do it vs. it cannot be done. :)

> 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.

I‘m merely pointing out you‘re unwilling to do it and your offer was impractical for users running any PHP extension but you were not straight forward in your answer previously. This segment at least makes it clear so thank you for being frank about it. To sum it up there is no desire by maintainers to do what users requested here so yay for that conclusion at least.


Cheers,
Franco