saving a few ports from death

[Eitan Adler]

>dougb is anxious to delete apache13 as well instead of simply disowning it...

The upstream maintainer already called it "end of life". FreeBSD does
not and will not ever take over the development of dead upstream ports
(and in this case there is a upstream version)

>The same entity(ies), that currently busy themselves marking things >"deprecated".

The ports marked "broken with no one to fix them" (shortened to
'deprecated') take a significant amount of time and energy to fix.
Think of the warning as a "call to fix" for those parts. If you feel

> No, not easily. It requires the CVS tree, which is not automatically
> installed. /usr/ports/obsoleted, on the other hand, would be rolled out
> together with the rest of the ports-tree.

And for those who want to use old, and likely broken ports, they can
take that effort to install the tree.

> And, under my proposal, the
> packages for the "obsolete" stuff will continue building.

Which is a *major* drain of resources. One of the reasons for ceasing
the building of packages for broken/completely obsolete is to avoid
draining the computer time building said packages. Take a guess how
long it takes to build from start to completion a complete set of
packages. I'll bet you get it wrong. Furthermore in order to continue
building packages the ports have to *work* which most of them
presently do not.

What you fail to understand is that we are NOT marking ports as
'obsolete' or 'bad' or 'there exists a better program' but as broken
and unmaintained. What we ARE saying is that "this port does not
presently work and no one took up the mantle to (a) fix it (b)
maintain it (c) continue to the maintain it in the future. There are
hundreds if not thousands of obsolete ports in the tree. This is
because someone decided to MAINTAIN the ports. We can not support
BROKEN ports unless someone does the work.

[snip]

> Same goes for apache13 -- last change was an upgrade to 1.3.42 (February
> 2010) -- it does not seem to require much work.

Apache 1.3 is DEAD and been supplanted upstream. If you wish to fork
apache 1.3 and make a new project we will GLADY host a port for it (if
someone decided to maintain it)

I strongly doubt that you have any idea of the amount of work it takes
to support 23,000 ports. Furthermore it seems that your proposals fail
to consider the amount of infrastructure work that must be delayed or
even prevented due to sheer number of broken and unmaintained ports.



-- 
Eitan Adler