Synth status and failure to install some packages

What is the current status of ports-mgmt/synth?

It seems deprecated by what I see on this emailing list, but I see occasional updates when I update ports tree.

One big nuisance is failure to install some build-dependency packages that might be not needed to run the "main" packages but might needed to build other things, especially if I am cross-compiling something for Linux.

I was stung by lacking such a dependency, gperf, and then I found it in the package repository created by synth, whereupon I installed it with "pkg install".

Gentoo Portage allows "with-bdeps=y" which allows the user to avoid this problem by installing the build dependencies.

Tom