Missing distfiles before July 2, 2012

[Joshua Root]

On 2012-9-2 19:08 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> I noticed that the oldest files on all of our distfiles mirror are from July 2, 2012.* I was wondering if the old files were intentionally removed, or whether this was an unintentional side effect of switching the primary distfiles mirror (from which all the others sync) to new hardware. (On the new hardware, did we perhaps only run "port mirror", on July 2, thus mirroring only the then-current versions of the software, instead of rsync'ing the whole collection from the old server?)

That's exactly what happened.

> Our policy had previously been to keep all old distfiles. This is especially valuable for old software projects whose web sites have gone away, or for projects which use unversioned and thus impermanent distfiles, and whose distfiles are thus only available on our mirrors, assuming the mirror fetched them at the time. That was actually one of the primary reasons why we set up distfiles mirrors of our own. If my assumption above is correct, then we still have distfiles of the latest version of all ports that we had before, we've just lost access to earlier versions of some of them.
> 
> I have no problem with the retention policy changing, if disk space is becoming a problem, I was just surprised to find old files missing with no announcement of intention to do that, so I thought I'd ask.

This does affect users following the InstallingOlderPort instructions
for some ports. There's also a GPL compliance issue in that we no longer
offer the corresponding source for older archives of GPL'd software that
are still available on packages.macports.org.

So if we don't bring back the older distfiles, we have to remove the
older archives, at least those for (L)GPL'd ports.

- Josh