Port Bloat

[Sam Lawrance]

Peter Thoenen wrote:
> A couple months ago somebody posted a heads up on this list from the
> FreeBSD Ports Team about ports bloat and the massive influx of new
> software along with all the unmaintained ports.  Has the port team ever
> thought about:
>
> A) Making a delete port pr request.  This way port maintainers INSTEAD
> of marking 'transfer ownership to ports at freebsd.org' and hoping
> somebody takes it over one day could actually just delete ports they no
> longer wish to maintain.  There should be some sort of WARN marking
> mechanism though (valid for X months (maybe 6)) that notifies any new
> user (or current via a portupgrade and EPOCH bumb) that this port is no
> longer maintained and scheduled for deletion unless one of them takes
> over maitainership by DATE.
>   

You can do this right now:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/dads-deprecated.html

Committers will regularly sweep through expired ports and remove them.

> B) In line with A, has anybody thought about just marking ALL
> ports at freebsd.org as scheduled for deletion on X date.  Thousands of
> people are using these ports, you can't tell me if they were actually
> scheduled to be deleted from the tree at least one of the users
> wouldn't take over maintainership.
>   

That's a fairly drastic action, and it would cause a massive amount of 
work.  People know we have unmaintained ports - they can submit updates 
if they wish.  Pruning out obsolete ports is useful too, but it requires 
motivation apart from an interest in just a single port.