Ports Future [was Re: Panther tickets]

[Scott Haneda]

Hijacking this to a new thread.  First time posting to the dev list,  
be gentle...

On May 20, 2009, at 8:43 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> 1. Every #ifdef or Panther-only work around adds to the overall  
> support burden of MacPorts.  Some day, assuming MacPorts lives long  
> enough to have such problems, most of the current set of people will  
> be retired / MIA / dead and it will fall to a new crop of engineers  
> to support the aging ball of goop collectively known as MacPorts.

This sounds ominous.  I push ports over fink all the time.  I never  
really knew why, until one day.  I saw there were a few apple.com  
email addresses on this list, and I also saw it was part of  
MacOSForge, which has a tie in to Apple in some way.

I translated this as meaning there was at least a stronger chance of  
ports lasting the test of time than anything else.

Is MacPorts in danger of dying a slow death?  I am still working on a  
number of ports, that one day will all tie into each other, to produce  
a simple and cohesive system/tool that I think will be valuable to a  
very large set of Mac OS X users.

It is a lot of work, should I be worried at all?
Thank you for your responses on this topic.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *