Re: Request to revive a port?

On 2024-06-05 10:35:34, Reshad Patuck (reshadpatuck1@gmail.com) wrote:

> I had a look at the FreeBSD-ports repository history and it looks like the
> Jove port expired in January this year.
> editors/jove||2024-01-18|Has expired: No upstream update in last 23 years
> The upstream for this port is
> https://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/moraes/jove/ARCHIVE/4.16/ with the latest
> files from 1996.

This seems a bit abitrary and unfair since MicroEMACS 4.0 (editors/uemacs)
remains in Ports despite upstream not being updated since 1996-04-22.

I uploaded the source to GitHub a few years ago as the maintainer of the
FreeBSD port. Maybe moving it to GitHub was enough to keep the
DeletionMonster(tm) away. Or maybe it was just overlooked. A mystery for
the ages.

I don't really use MicroEMACS myself any more but I believe there are still
some FreeBSD users that do, so I'd prefer it wasn't deleted solely because
it's unmaintained. (If I was being really petty and stubborn I could fork
the source, change one byte and claim it was maintained again!)

In time there will be a lot more unmaintained open source software. Age
alone can't be enough to remove something from Ports. A good example is
archives/zip which hasn't seen an update since 2008.

PS. I've just discovered there's now a fork of the newer MicroEMACS 5.0
which has been patched to run under FreeBSD:

git clone https://github.com/JoachimSchneider/MicroEmacs
cd MicroEmacs/ue500/freebsd/termcap
make
./emacs