Re: Another berserker victim: 03b36d9 textproc/obsidian: Remove expired port

On Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:08:53 +0200
Daniel Engberg <daniel.engberg.lists@pyret.net> wrote:

> On 2024-06-16T12:37:28.000+02:00, Gleb Popov <arrowd@freebsd.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > This is partly my fault as a maintainer. We've updated Obsidian in our
> > 
> > $WORK tree, but I forgot to upstream it.
> > 
> > But I also agree that we should make an exception for Electron ports, because
> > 
> > - Electron itself is pretty fast-moving, but at the same time has a
> > 
> > lot of commercial consumers that aren't that keen for keeping up with
> > 
> > its pace
> > 
> > - We only have electron package building on the cluster, so it
> > 
> > wouldn't hurt package building side of things anyway.
> > 
> > What do you think, Rene?
> 
> The thing is that they're very heavy, tends to accumulate CVEs quite
> fast and have a lot of dependencies that we need to maintain (since
> it's EoL upstream). We already have 4 versions in tree which is quite
> a lot already.and likely quite time-consuming to maintain as it is.
> >From what I can tell it also appears that almost every other distro
> have dropped Electron 25 as it been EoL for 6 months already.
> https://forumobsidian.md/t/electron-25-is-now-eol-please-upgrade-to-a-newer-version/72878
> 
> Given upstream's versioning I guess upstream recently started
> supporting a more recent version as 1.6 was released about a week ago
> and there's an alpha release using Electron 30.
> 
> I do think the correct decision here was to remove it despite not
> having a "fix" for all consumers though.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Daniel

My guess is that most fatal problem about electron is that newer
version does NOT assure building sources for old versions.
Act just like C compilers does SHALL be how programming language
processing system do. Even llvm/clang 18 can compile/link and run K&R
sources. This is how SHALL be.

If electron30 can build everything written in electron25 sanely, at
worst with an option to specify language version, there should be no
problems. No worries. Just switching BUILD_DEPENDS to the latest
supported stable version (with modifying build options) is sufficient.

If not, I can't call electron* as a proper programming language
processing system.

But for interpreters, preparing binaries for older version based on the
latest code can be an option.

-- 
Tomoaki AOKI    <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp>