Recent ports removal

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 12:40:12PM -0800, Stanislav Sedov wrote:
> Because portmgr@ is using it?  There're numerous cases when unmaintained, buggy,
> vulnerable and plainly dangerous stuff stays in tree because someone in portmgr
> gang likes it when other applications not used by them being removed without
> prior discussion notice.

There are always periodic emails, both to individual maintainers and
ports@, that summarize which ports are deprecated, expiring, and forbidden.
That's served as the best springboard for discussion I know how to do in an
automated fashion, for several years.  In many rounds of those emails I get
responses which result in ports being kept from the scrapheap.

I'm not aware of vulnerable things that stay in (other than gnats3, which
is still part of our infrastructure), and php52, which apparently is so
widely used that we must continue to support it despite our best effrots
to clean up the tree.  Which other ones are there?

>From your email I'm sure you don't believe me, but we are attempting to
be objective about removing stale, broken, and dangerous code.  It's an
imperfect art and relies on judgement calls.

Surely we can come up with a better alternative than "just leave ports
in forever".  I don't think this serves our users well.

mcl