deprecated ports
Charlie Kester
corky1951 at comcast.net
Tue Mar 15 21:58:12 UTC 2011
I see there's been another few batch commits deprecating some
unmaintained ports where "upstream is gone and/or distfile is no longer
available."
Maintainers and prospective maintainers should be sure to look at the
ports listed in these commits. I don't think much effort was made to
check the availability of the distfiles. Instead, it seems that all
that was done was to try the MASTER_SITES, etc. from the port Makefiles,
and if the fetch failed, onto the list they went.
NOTE: I'm NOT saying the committers' procedure was too lazy or anything
like that. There are a lot of these broken ports in the tree, and
deprecation seems like a reasonable step to take -- especially if the
result is to trigger some action from people who want to see these ports
retained.
I just rescued one of these, sysutils/lookat, that was deprecated a few
days ago. I followed the WWW link in the pkg-descr, found that the
author's website was still up and that the distfile could still be
downloaded -- but the download url had changed. So all the port needed
was a tweak to the MASTER_SITES.
Today I see that the fairly popular graphics/gimpshop has also been
deprecated. Here the WWW link from pkg-descr also fails, but a quick
websearch found the new (?) official website for this app:
http://www.gimpshop.com, where the distfile is available for download.
So here's another one that can be easily rescued.
And I'll bet there are more.
More information about the freebsd-ports
mailing list