Dead projects in ports tree

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com> wrote:
> --On Monday, March 02, 2009 16:36:38 -0600 "David E. Thiel" <lx at FreeBSD.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> While I'm in favor of removing useless ports, there are several projects
>> which are simply "done", and lack of development doesn't mean they're
>> obsolete or useless.
>
> I completely agree.  So long as a port is being used and people find it
> useful, I think it would be a mistake to remove those ports.  In fact I
> suspect it wouldn't be long before someone was submitting a PR to reinstate
> the port. Perfect example is converters/unix2dos, last updated in 2003 and
> converters/mpack, last updated in 2006.
>
> I still use both, and I would be irritated if they were removed from ports.
>
> A lack of development activity != a lack of usefulness

I agree for projects like that that are feature complete.

However, projects like xmms drag on the use of gtk 1.2 and will soon
be out of date in terms of file formats, decoding capability, etc.
Then again I suppose when that day comes xmms will be marked busted
and eventually shuffled out of the tree, so I'll shut my trap about
that :).

openquicktime is another thing though: it's not useful for decoding
today's quicktime videos because Apple's vastly updated the quicktime
movie format -- thus unless someone's using it for some ancient format
that's no longer used in mainstream, I personally don't understand the
need for it in the tree. Also, I remember various security issues
being reported with openquicktime in Gentoo Linux back a few years ago
(when I used it religiously), so I really wonder how safe some of the
3rd party software is that is available via pkg / ports and is
extremely out-of-date. Same with realplayer (or helix, or whatever it
evolved into...).

I'm just trying spark some interest in reducing the number of
stale/unmaintainable ports in the tree because we have a large number
of ports that aren't cared for like they should be :(.

Thanks,
-Garrett