Am 17.03.2011 11:36, schrieb Pietro Cerutti:
all these efforts to rescue the ports are all good, but: do we actually
_need_ the ports? Just having one more port isn't a value in itself.
It's a potential value. Having one port less is a potential loss.
Unless there is another one to take over.
And if yes, can someone step up to become maintainer of the port,
meaning, upgrade it to new versions, sort FreeBSD bug reports and
forward/file them with the upstream authors, and all that?
Well, this is not how it works. There are a lot of old ports which
are not being developped upstreams anymore. Probably nobody is
interested in maintaining those, because there's nothing to do to those
ports other than fixing potential build problems. However, this doesn't
imply that the port is useless or that nobody's interested in using it.
Not all consumers of FreeBSD ports follow ports@.
But exactly in such situations ("nothing to do") being a maintainer is
an extremely low effort because you hardly ever get input, but you are
sort of a godfather to the port in case it fails. And it's prudent for
a maintainer to ask for help anyways.
I'd be very carful on killing ports. I agree on killing BROKEN ports
where the distfiles are not fetchable anymore. In this case, nobody can
benefit from having the (non working) port. But I wouldn't go further.
And I'd welcome ANY effort to resurrect a port or make it workable
again, even if it does not imply setting a real MAINTAINER.
I've done steps towards getting gpart working again, but I fear we'll be
running in circles unless ports are maintained. I've taken
maintainership of gpart now based on my own argument written above.
And while I haven't fully audited gpart or looked through its code, the
first impression was "not stellar but reasonably OK with some
portability headaches" so it's probably reasonably low profile, too.
Best regards
--
Matthias Andree
ports committer
_______________________________________________
freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
