The truth about net-im/ymessenger

[Eric P. Scott]

It's been deprecated under somewhat false pretenses.  :-)

The current port is set to IGNORE, claiming [it] "is a dynamically
linked binary linked to old version of gtkhtml no longer in ports."

PR# 91491 alleged "The Yahoo! messenger port doesn't work on
FreeBSD-4.11," and submitted what I consider a bad patch:
deliberately breaking things for FreeBSD 4.x users by "upgrading"
to a 5.x build, without providing appropriate conditionals for
4.x users.  That was a mistake...

It turns out that on a FreeBSD 4.11 machine, updated to
4.11-SECURITY, with the latest ports and packages installed, the
"old" ymessenger port (20020902) is still "good."  There's just a
small "gotcha."

It seems, somewhere along the line, a couple of shared libraries
were renamed.  This typically merits a fairly inconspicuous
mention in /usr/ports/UPDATING, instructing users to relink
everything affected.  Of course, that's not exactly helpful
advice when you're dealing with a binary port.  It turns out a
simple libmap.conf file is all it took to bring a "dead" FreeBSD
4.5(?) executable back to life:

# /etc/libmap.conf
#
# candidate		mapping
#

[/usr/local/libexec/ymessenger/ymessenger.bin]
libgdk12.so.2		libgdk-12.so.2
libglib12.so.3		libglib-12.so.3
libgmodule12.so.3	libgmodule-12.so.3
libgtk12.so.2		libgtk-12.so.2


The only reason this port should be allowed to die is there's
an unfortunate bug in this version: your friends will always
appear to be offline.  It's fixed in 1.0.6.1--which was only
released for Linux.  While net-im/linux-ymessenger has a few
"rough edges," it works well enough to be usable.

The next time someone claims a port should be marked BROKEN
merely because something "doesn't work" (or doesn't compile on
4.x), apply a little skepticism.  It's often due to something
fairly trivial.  The Porter's Handbook doesn't adequately address
this, but there are some important and extremely relevant notes
in the FreeBSD Wiki.

					-=EPS=-