deprecated ports

[Jason Helfman]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 02:58:01PM -0700, Charlie Kester thus spake:
>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.
>
To this point I just found another:
sysutils/idled was just deprecated the other day.

In following some weblinks, I found that doinkd has replaced it:
sysutils/doinkd

:)

Maybe the DEPRECATION line should be altered.

-jgh