svn commit: r308158 - in head: . lang lang/tcl82 x11-toolkits x11-toolkits/tk82

[Bryan Drewery]

On 12/3/2012 4:18 PM, Pietro Cerutti wrote:
> On 2012-Dec-03, 11:07, Bryan Drewery wrote:
>> On 12/3/2012 10:49 AM, Pietro Cerutti wrote:
>>> Author: gahr
>>> Date: Mon Dec  3 16:49:48 2012
>>> New Revision: 308158
>>> URL: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/ports/308158
>>>
>>> Log:
>>>   - Retire Tcl/Tk 8.2 now that the last consumer (deskutils/abacus) has gone
>>>   - Fix typo in previous commit in MOVED
>>>   
>>>   Feature safe:	yes
>>>
>>
>>
>> I take issue with retiring a library/language port with such short
>> notice like this, since no other ports depend on it. This certainly
>> could live on as a leaf port and still be useful.
> 
> While in theory I could agree with you, please take into consideration a
> couple of facts:
> 
> * the latest Tcl/Tk in the 8.2 series was released on Dec 16, 1999,
>   which means that users have had 13 years to upgrade.

Fair enough.

> 
> * we have 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 in the tree, which means that users can
>   choose among 4 different versions to upgrade to.

Yes, that is true, but users/consumers don't always have an easy option
to upgrade. I work on a project that is stuck on TCL 8.3. So with time
8.3 is eventually going to be removed just the same as 8.2.

> 
> * I've marked it as deprecated specifying the deletion date one week ago
>   (admittedly not much), and the deletion date was also on the FreeBSD
>   Tcl/Tk wiki page, which means that you could have spoken up earlier if
>   this removal really caused you any problems.

I did take issue with TCL 8.2 being taken from ports@ just 1 week ago
and marked deprecated, but sat on that. It's really not much notice to
someone using this.


> 
> <smile>
> Having said this, please feel free to
> 
> * get the two ports back into the tree
> * set an expiration date that makes sense to you
> * make sure they build / run fine on every FreeBSD release we support
> * make sure to remove them at due time
> 
> if you really want to.
> </smile>
> 

I'll pass and drop this.

I don't have a huge interest in maintaining TCL 8.2, just feel that it
seemed to be managing just fine on ports at . My own uses of it are small
and I can migrate my users over to 8.3.

I understand that there is work involved in maintaining bsd.tcl.mk with
old versions like this and don't want to strain that further.


I suppose my complaint was more broad than just this port. I don't
usually agree with the "nothing more depends on this" being a good
reason, as we have many development library/language leaf ports.

This extends to things like gcc2x; I wish we still had ports for those,
and gcc34 is DEPRECATED because only 3 ports still require it. Nevermind
some developer may be using it to maintain maximum portability for their
project. Gentoo Portage has 30 something GCC versions available (10 of
which are "stable").

IMHO I think we need to consider that ports are not the only users of
ports as sometimes we seem to think that a port is only needed as a
dependency, but it can be useful as a leaf too. pkg-config is an example
of this. Maybe I want to test with that, even though nothing needs it.

Bryan

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