Ability for maintainers to update own ports

[Oliver Eikemeier]

Charles Swiger wrote:

> On Nov 11, 2003, at 2:38 PM, Oliver Eikemeier wrote:
> 
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> More broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be significant interest
>>> from the community to provide support for old releases.  If there was,
>>> it's something that could be provided by a group of interested members
>>> of this list.
>>
>> sysutils/pkg_install is a[n] attempt to supports older releases.  In a
>> production environment it is not always possible to upgrade the base
>> system at will.  I'll try my best not to break backwards compatibility
>> without a good reason.
> 
> Good for you, Oliver.  I don't think you're the only person with that 
> sentiment; a significant number of ports reference OSVERSION in order to 
> behave correctly on older versions of the OS:
> 
> % find /usr/ports -name Makefile -exec grep -l OSVERSION {} \; | wc -l
>      585

Or to differentiate between -STABLE and -CURRENT?

[...]

> Apache-1.3.29, Python-2.3.2, and a lot of other useful software will 
> build and install on versions of FreeBSD prior to 4.7 without using 
> ports.  The intent of the ports system is to help users run software on 
> their machine, not to require users to upgrade to the latest version of 
> the OS in order to update such ports.

I expect very few ports to fail on older systems (if they are not too old).
The problem for most maintainers here is testing (and debugging). I don't
support older systems in that sense, I can only try to fix problems that
are reported. No QA team to test the port on 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 here...

But AFAIK Apple is deprecating old Mac OS X versions quite fast now, faster
that they did with Mac OS 9, so that doesn't seem to be so uncommon even
on commerical *BSD platforms?