> I have strong opinions against this, at least for ports with an active > maintainer. I really see these deprecation campaigns as treading on > somebody's toes. > > I really like linimon's periodic emails "FreeBSD ports that you maintain > which are currently marked broken", which I see as a reminder that there > are ports of mine that require action, but going further than that and > deprecate a port that I maintain without even informing me in an > official way is not what I consider collaboration. > > Even more so because I don't see any advantage in moving a port from > BROKEN to DEPRECATED state. If a user has a working version of the port > installed, he will stick to that, otherwise, installation will be frown > upon anyway. > > I and bapt have already exchanged opinions on this subject more than > once, and I would now like to see what other people (other maintainers > in particular) think about it. > > Can we please stop this? > > -- > Pietro Cerutti > The FreeBSD Project > g...@freebsd.org > > PGP Public Key: > http://gahr.ch/pgp
As you inquire people's opinion, I would say that I find this way of proceeding a bit pushy and I consider it a good example of closed communication as I find it: - non-caring: such a commit is a detached and impersonal way to give the information to a maintainer that has not unbroken his port for a long time - dogmatic: it looks like an unwillingness to accept the maintainer's point of view or at least to hear about his work on maintaining the port - superior: deprecating without prior communication with the maintainer stresses differences in status between portmgr/committer and maintainers Hence I am not surprised when you say you feel someone is treading on your toes, and more generally I fear this does not do any good to maintainer's motivation and commitment to the project. On the other hand I also believe those deprecation actions are necessary and I thank bapt for his work on this. To conciliate such a necessary action without hurting the feelings of those maintainers who despite their work could not update the state of their port in a timely manner, maybe it would be good to be more verbose in the log of such commits. Inspired by linimon's emails, something like the following could be added: "As part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of problems in the FreeBSD ports system, we periodically schedule removal of ports that have been marked as broken for a period of at least six months. As a maintainer of one of those ports, feel free to remove the deprecate status if you need more time to fix the breakage and do not hesitate to contact portmgr@ if you need additional information on this policy." I hope this brings something to the discussion. -- Frederic Culot cu...@freebsd.org
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