Update or remove

[Mark Linimon]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, Sam Lawrance wrote:

> In my trawl through unmaintained port fetch errors, I'm coming across
> more and more libraries in a similar state - old, unfetchable, and
> unused by the rest of the tree. General guidance appreciated. I think
> it's better to nuke them and save the maintenance effort for other
> stuff. Should I just rack up a list and post them here later?

There is no consensus.  Some committers seem to think that since they
aren't harming anything there's no reason to remove them.  Others
seem to think that since they've disappeared that it means that it
is time to remove them.  I lean more towards the latter, personally,
but I suspect I'm in the minority on this one.

I think the issue is a little clearer if there is both a version 1.x
and 2.x in the tree and all the dependencies in INDEX are for 2.x --
but be careful, you really need to grep over ports/*/*/Makefile for
cases where the 1.x version is a _conditional_ dependency based on
the value of certain knobs.  We've been burned on this in the past.

I guess if we ever fix the fetching for all the ports that _are_
current dependencies, then we can figure out what to do with these :-)
But in any case they should probably go through the usual N-week
cycle where they're marked DEPRECATED and so forth, so people get
a chance to speak up and say if they are still using them.

This is not to say we don't appreciate your work on flagging all
these unfetchable ports that you've been doing, btw, because we
certainly do.

mcl