XPI infrastructure needs some love

[Rob Farmer]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 19:39, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> My concern with this for some time is that there is little to no actual
> benefit for the vast majority of these ports, however they do consume
> resources. Admittedly not an overwhelming number of resources, but given the
> fact that ports/package resources are stretched thin, and we'd like to
> expand support for packages going forward, I think we need to carefully
> evaluate these choices, especially given that we're losing maintainers. As a
> quick overview I did a find for ports with xpi in the name and there are
> well over 100. That doesn't include other ports with different naming
> conventions.
>
> My suggestion is that we simply eliminate these ports altogether, but I
> realize that's not likely to happen. :)

Around 6 months ago, a similar thing was proposed for a number of
eclipse plugins - they can all be installed and updated via the
builtin update manager and nothing is built for FreeBSD - they are
just Java stuff that can be binary downloaded and run anywhere.

People wanted them kept because in a corporate environment the admin
can provide a consistent version to all users and update them using
whatever methods they already use for other ports.

-- 
Rob Farmer