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Programming Operating Systems BSD IT Technology

Broken FreeBSD Ports Scheduled for Removal 45

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Kris Kennaway says that the following FreeBSD ports are scheduled for removal on November 7 if they are still broken at that time and no PRs have been submitted to fix them. If you are interested in saving these ports, please send your patches to the maintainer. If the maintainer is unresponsive or the port has no maintainer, then please submit them via send-pr."
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Broken FreeBSD Ports Scheduled for Removal

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  • Phew! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    databases/firebird firebird-1.0.2 chris@aims.com.au
    databases/firebird-devel firebird-1.0.r2 chris@aims.com.au
    Close call, Firebird the database *not* the browser. Seems reasonable, who uses Firebird when we've got MySQL?
  • Will portupgrade ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by forsetti ( 158019 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:09PM (#6713145)
    ... remove the port if I have it installed, since my post Nov 7 cvsup will remove the port from my ports directory?
    • by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:28PM (#6713236)

      No. If you've already installed the port, then this change will not delete the installed copy. (It will still be deleted from your ports directory.) However, you may want to fix the port so it stays in the tree, if the port is important to you. Some of the so-called "broken" ports work fine, and some only need minor tweaking.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:18PM (#6713178)
    Its not *BSD that is dying, but rather, just some of the ports that are dying. Whew, I was afraid for a while there I might have to move to a different OS.
  • At some point, you just have to cut the fat. If these ports have been broken for so long and no one has made an effort, then their disappearance should be transparent. In fact, I would like to see this logic applied to the entire PR system. Old PR's should be closed and archived as "known issues."
    • Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)

      by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @03:19PM (#6713429) Journal
      Now, if someone could just convice SourceForge to do the same.
    • At some point, you just have to cut the fat.

      Exactly. Gardeners call it pruning. It's a sign of healthy, normal growth.

    • Re:Good. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @05:41PM (#6714025)

      I disagree, at least in part. I saw some software in there that I had manually installed and didn't realize was in ports. I saw some stuff that I use but rarely update.

      Also, just because a port is marked as broken doesn't mean no one has made an effort. There may be outstanding dialog with the developers or maintainers, and it hasn't produced a fix yet.

      • Well, this way they have a deadline to sort things out. It's not like a given project can't go back in again, it's just what's currently deadweight being removed now.
  • by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @02:40PM (#6713287) Journal
    With the work going on with Freebsd/Gentoo/Fink/Darwin to work on a combined port system, I'm wondering if there is a automated ports checker to verify which ports compile out of the box? Seems there is alot of work that needs to be done to weed out the broken ports, and report ports with compile errors.

    Also, a while back there was an OpenBSD announcement that the ports collection for both Open and Free had almost 20% ports that where broken. This small list is what, 3%? (guess)

    Nice to see them to work on cleaning some ports, but is there a grand plan?

  • by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Saturday August 16, 2003 @03:15PM (#6713408)
    If a port is important to you, then fix it! Many of these ports only require trivial changes. So far today, I've submitted fixes for two of the ports that I want to live: games/xpuyo and emulators/its. Both only required simple changes.
  • /usr/ports/net/dcgui - this port is forbidden because of a security hole. Its really old (0.1.1 beta IIRC). 0.2.9 is out. I tried installing it manually but it failed miserably; it won't be trivial getting it to work.

    Please, an experienced coder needs to fix dcgui, for the sake of the RIAA.

  • Ok, I realize that epsxe is not technically "broken," as it does install, but on my two 5.1-RELEASE systems it segfaults upon execution. (or at least it doesn't display anything and the process is not there on top) I notified the maintainer about this issue about 2 weeks ago, and he has not yet responded. Well, it *is* a closed-source program as far as I can tell, so it is probably a difficult port if it has any linuxisms in its design.

    Anyway, maybe it works under 4.7, or 4.8, (though I wouldn't know...)

  • Is anyone ever going to fix scwm? Isn't it possible to concurrently install two versions of guile?

    -Tim

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