saving a few ports from death

[Doug Barton]

On 04/27/2011 13:54, Eitan Adler wrote:
> 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.

... and in addition to CPU cycles there is also storage on the dozens of 
mirrors for packages, distfiles, cvs, etc. Almost all of those mirrors 
are provided by organizations that donate their resources to help the 
FreeBSD community. Many of them are already stretched thin.

I don't think the view that "we don't provide a warranty" is realistic. 
If you took 100 FreeBSD users and asked them, "Would you be surprised to 
find a known-bad version of something in the ports tree?" I think 99 of 
them would say, "yes!"

Those who want to keep EOL stuff around also seem to be ignoring that in 
FreeBSD the model is generally "maintainer knows best." To take apache13 
as a specific example, the maintainers of that port have said pretty 
clearly, "it's a bad idea to keep using this, and we want to get rid of 
it ASAP." At least one of those maintainers is part of the ASF, so I 
tend to take his word on such things.

Finally, as someone else pointed out, if you decide for yourself that 
you really really need something that's been removed from the ports 
tree, you can always dig it out of CVS. Yes, I realize that's extra work 
on your part, but that's part of the "price" of "free" software.


Doug

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