Removing documentation

[John Marino]

On 2/11/2016 10:32 PM, Matt Smith wrote:
> Remember that before portmaster we had cvsup which was written in
> Modula-3 and portupgrade which is written in Ruby. Whilst it is nice
> that portmaster is just a simple shell script with no dependancies
> that's a relatively new thing.

I'm familiar with the M3 situation (I actual maintain the M3 port which
came in after CVS was removed) and I understand why people are gunshy
about obscure languages.

I don't think this is a comparable situation though.  A broken Synth
cannot leave the system in a bad or unrecoverable state.  One could
remove it and it's products in a second and the machines that used it
would continue as normal.  There are alternatives (ports, official
packages, poudriere, portmaster, etc) so there's no critical path.

I'm always aware (and was bitten by) portupgrade and ruby.  I know why
people wouldn't want that again.  Still the situation cannot be compared
to Synth.

Portmaster was good in that it didn't have its own database and used the
ports framework.  Poudriere also does that and now Synth, so it's no
longer unique in that aspect.

Dependencies matter if it's part of a bootstrap process or maybe part of
base or in a critical path, but I don't think any of that applies in
this case.

John