How to remove a port from MacPorts?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 7, 2011, at 16:07, Marko Käning wrote:

> I followed your advice in r76753. It worked out nicely. Thanks again. Doing so one would not need to actually remove the port from the port tree, in case somebody wants to resurrect it at a later time.
> 
> As said, I'll update the Guide with the info you supplied.
> 
> BTW: I can't find the term "stub port" in the guide either. ;-) Guess that would also need some explanation. Wonder what other cases of stub ports are possible…

The other case for a stub port would be software that is removed, with no replacement available; in that case, everything applies as before, except there would be no replaced_by. I don't know if we've had any of those. Certainly we did have some stub ports before replaced_by was implemented; these ports were coded differently, but if any of those remain, they can probably be deleted immediately since replaced_by has been around for over a year.

Removing the stub port after everybody can reasonably be expected to have upgraded is a good idea to reduce clutter in the ports tree. My guideline for a reasonable amount of time is one year; if anybody hasn't updated their ports in a year, they're probably better off uninstalling and reinstalling, since there's a good chance they've upgraded their OS in that time too and so would need to reinstall anyway.