Time to mark portupgrade deprecated?

[milki]

On 22:30 Sun 24 Jul     , Steve Wills wrote:
> On 07/24/11 22:20, Eitan Adler wrote:
> > At this point noone is maintaining portupgrade any more and a large
> > number of PRs have been filed against it (see
> > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi?text=portupgrade). No
> > one has stepped up to do the work to fix these bugs so it is time to
> > officially drop it.
> 
> Personally, I agree it's time to drop it if no one is going to do the
> work to maintain it, which at this point it seems clear is not going to
> happen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that.
> 
> So the question becomes, how do we go about doing it? First step would
> be changing the handbook. Most UPDATING entries seem to include both
> portupgrade and portmaster instructions these days, so that should be
> covered. The next issue would be warning portupgrade users, perhaps by
> marking the port DEPRECATED? I'd think a date a little longer than the
> usual month would be needed before expiring.

I would agree with this for the most part. However, when I recently
fubarred my /usr/ports/packages when I accidently terminated in the
middle of portmaster operations, I found the easiest way to recover was
to use portupgrade (portmaster was complaining about missing packages
and deleting/reinstalling/deinstalling/etc failed to fix this). I think
its good to have alternate installers for situations like this since
they have different strengths and weaknesses.

Certainly documentation for portmaster needs to be added and promoted as
a ports manager.

That being said, I personally have had some vested
interest in improving portupgrade and looked over the code when I
submitted a patch before knowing no one was fixing it. In my naivete,
maybe I could tackle portupgrade...

-- 
milki
milki at rescomp.berkeley.edu