deprecated ports

[Doug Barton]

On 03/15/2011 15:16, Charlie Kester wrote:
> BTW, I don't use either of these, or gimpshop, so I'm not going to fix
> the ports myself.  Instead, I'll leave that to anyone who's interested.

Charlie,

I think you've been very diplomatic in your approach, so to be clear I 
don't have a problem with either the content or method of your messages.

That said, I think that un-deprecating these ports just because someone 
can find a distfile somewhere is the wrong approach. bapt has been very 
careful to only deprecate ports that are on the absolute bottom of the 
pile. They are unmaintained, and unfetchable. That's generally a very 
good indication that they are also unused. Thus marking them deprecated 
to see if anyone picks them up, and then removing them if not, is the 
right approach. I also think that what you did with sysutils/lookat is 
proof that this method works.

Further, IMO we need to be much more aggressive in removing stale ports. 
Anything that is removed that it turns out people actually use can be 
restored from CVS literally with a few keystrokes. It's all well and 
good to say how cool it is that we have 22,000+ ports, but when you 
start looking at maintenance, infrastructure updates, etc. having stale 
stuff makes life much harder for everyone.


Doug

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