Google Code as an upstream is gone

[David Demelier]

2016-09-29 17:36 GMT+02:00 Mathieu Arnold <mat at freebsd.org>:
> Le 29/09/2016 à 17:03, Christian Weisgerber a écrit :
>> On 2016-09-14, Mathieu Arnold <mat at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Google Code has been deprecated[1] since March 2015, and read-only since
>>> August 2015, giving time to software developers to move their
>>> development some place else. All the distribution files that still use
>>> solely googlecode.com as their source have been marked BROKEN today in
>>> r422140[2], as they are not fetchable.
>>>
>>> Most software have moved to some other place (mostly on github), all you
>>> have to do is figure out where and update your ports accordingly.
>> Or you can simply replace
>>
>> ${PROJECT}.googlecode.com/files/
>>
>> with
>>
>> https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/${PROJECT}/
>>
>> which could have trivially been done in bsd.sites.mk.
>>
>
> No you cannot.
>
> Before marking all the ports BROKEN, I started by changing the
> MASTER_SITE_GOOGLE_CODE entry to make things fetchable again. The
> problem with that approach is that it is just hiding the fact that the
> software have not been updated for more than a year and will never be
> again. The goal of marking all those ports broken is that people will go
> and look for where the software went after google code, so that it gets
> updated when new releases go out.
>
> If the software has not been moved to some other place, (it takes about
> 30 seconds to click the automatic migration to github thing, and it is
> usually done within the hour,) since march 2015, it is most likely
> abandoned and should not be kept in the ports tree.
>

As many have pointed out here, abandoned does not mean it's not usable
anymore. There are dozen of ports or software not maintained anymore
and still work because they do not require maintenance.

Marking as broken is a bit hurried IMHO. We should provide a longer
expiration date by keeping distfiles to our FreeBSD mirrors for a
while until the upstream moves to somewhere else. Of course, we should
also bulk mail the maintainer to tell that the port will expire and
distfiles removed at the time.

Regards,

-- 
Demelier David