There is currently some talk of dropping the vax architecture. I'm cautiously optimistic that it will happen. This would allow us to remove all sorts of cruft from the ports tree.
First, there is vax itself. Removing support from infrastructure/ is straightforward. Then Makefiles and patches need to be grepped for LIBM_CHECK, vax, and __vax__. Most of this stuff can probably just be removed, some may require non-mechanical changes. The vax is the last static architecture and there will never be another one. This makes for some major cleaning. At least CONFIGURE_SHARED, NO_SHARED_ARCHS, NO_SHARED_LIBS, and SHARED_ONLY can be removed and PFRAG.shared can be folded into PLIST. We may want to script some of that since it touches hundreds of ports. I expect espie@ will suggest that we don't do a concerted clean-up right away and instead remove these things as part of regular port updates. From previous experience, I don't think this works well. A small part of the ports tree gets updated a lot, but most of it is touched only rarely. Also, the idea of cleaning up old cruft is to get rid of it, not to add yet another thing to remember when working on a port. Once the ball drops, we'll need to coordinate any clean-up actions. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
