Port Bloat

[Mark Linimon]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 10:53:32PM -0700, Peter Thoenen wrote:
> B) In line with A, has anybody thought about just marking ALL
> ports at freebsd.org as scheduled for deletion on X date.

It turns out that a few of them are key pieces of infrastructure.  Perhaps
we can generate a list of "ports that we would really like to see adopted."

It has also turned out, in the past, that "one man's trash is another man's
treasure" as the old saying goes.  When we first instituted the DEPRECATED/
EXPIRATION_DATE process, a lot of people did indeed adopt some ports in a
flurry of activity, but there was a fair amount of fuss generated, too.
Since then, several hundred stale/dead ports have indeed been pruned.

Unfortunately we don't really have any good proxy for "what ports are in
use".  The closest we have is FreshPorts subscriptions, which, the last
we checked, showed that several thousand ports were not being tracked by
anyone who subscribed.  Unfortunately the sample space for FreshPorts is
self-selecting so it can't be taken as authoritative.  I advocate that
people subscribe to FreshPorts and list the ports they use so that we can
better judge this.

One of my eventual goals for portsmon is to include "date of last commit"
(as well as the fetch survey results) to try to generate another proxy for
this.  I don't have any other ideas that wouldn't just create a bunch of
controversy, however.

mcl