ports/graphics/netpbm out of date

[Oliver Fromme]

Peter Jeremy wrote:
 > On 2011-Mar-29 13:51:21 +0200, Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> wrote:
 > > Both graphics/netpbm and graphics/netpbm-devel are *WAY*
 > > out of date (5 to 6 years).
 > 
 > I don't understand you.  In my experience, the netpbm ports have
 > always been updated fairly regularly.  The ports currently have:
 > STABLE_PORTVERSION=     10.26.64
 > DEVEL_PORTVERSION=      10.35.80
 > 
 > 10.26.64 is the last of the 10.26 series and was released
 > almost exactly 18 months ago.
 > 
 > 10.35.80 is the current "stable" version and was released 
 > about 5 weeks ago.  The port was updated the day following
 > the release.

The problem is that 10.26 is 6 years old, and 10.35 is 5 years
old.  The fact that they have been updated to the latest patch
releases doesn't matter much, that's just bug fixes.  But they
are missing a lot of functionality.  For example, many tools
don't support transparency via PAM yet.  For example, the
pngtopam and pamtopng tools (for preserving the alpha channel)
don't exist; they occured in 10.44.  

The current "stable" version is 10.47 (.27), and the current
"advanced" version (this is not the development version!) is
10.53 (.05).

I think that it makes sense to update the netpbm port to the
"stable" version, and the netpbm-devel port to "advanced".

However, the problem with that is that the netpbm folks don't
provide tarballs anymore.  You have to check out the stuff
from their SVN repository.  SourceForge provides a download
URL that automatically packages the current source tree of a
specified version (stable or advanced) and returns a .tar.gz
file.  But of course you get a different .tar.gz file when a
developer commits a patch, so this is not suitable as distfile
for a FreeBSD port.  I'm not sure how to resolve that problem.
Maybe upload a specific .tar.gz with a time stamp to a site
that can be used as master site.

 > > What's making things is worse is the fact that the netpbm
 > > ports don't include any documentation.  Instead they refer
 > > to the online documentation which is way ahead of the
 > > state of the FreeBSD port, as explained above.
 > 
 > I agree this is annoying and don't understand the rationale behind the
 > way netpbm documentation is handled but that is not the FreeBSD
 > maintainer's fault.

You are right, that's not the maintainer's fault, of course.

But updating the FreeBSD port to a more recent version would
make the problems smaller that are caused by the netpbm
documentation policy.

 > > Is anybody working on updating the netpbm ports?  Is there
 > > any problem with it that I'm not aware of?
 > 
 > A quick check would have identified the maintainer (now Cc'd).

Thank you.  I'm sorry, I should have done that in the first
place.

Best regards
   Oliver

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