On Dec 18, 2020, at 14:28, Clemens Lang wrote:
>> 2. Next time(?) I update MP I presume YouTube-dl won’t update. Will it
>> be removed? Will it no longer work? Is there a way to keep the port I
>> have currently functioning?
>
> MacPorts mirrors the upstream files, so even if youtube-dl were removed
> from GitHub, the port would continue to work.
Even if we were to remove a port from MacPorts, if you had installed it, you
would continue to have it installed until you decide to uninstall it, either
explicitly with `sudo port uninstall youtube-dl` or by running cleanup
operations like `sudo port reclaim`. But what Clemens said is true: software
bitrots over time, so even if a port works today, especially a port that
communicates with services over the network, that doesn't guarantee that it
will work tomorrow. Similarly, software that works with today's version of
macOS and the versions of the libraries it depends on that are in MacPorts
today, that doesn't guarantee that an update to the OS or Xcode or the
libraries it needs won't break it in the future.
> Additionally, the
> youtube-dl source code was always available from youtube-dl.org, so even
> if the GitHub repository would not have been restored, we would just
> have switched the port to use that source instead.
At the time that the DMCA takedown request was issued, the youtube-dl web site
was hosted on GitHub Pages, so it got taken down as well, and the source code
was only hosted on GitHub Releases, so it was not available there either,
though it continued to be available from the MacPorts distfile mirrors. They
then moved to a different web host to restore the web site and added the source
code download to the web site. During that time, the youtube-dl port was
switched to download from that web site. Now that the GitHub repo has been
restored, the port has switched back to downloading from GitHub.
Our ticket tracking the situation was https://trac.macports.org/ticket/61369
