removal suggestion: port rpm

[Landon J Fuller]

On Aug 21, 2013, at 5:30 AM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 10:31:20AM +1000, Joshua Root wrote:
>> It's technically true that deleted code is all there in the history,
>> but practically speaking nobody is ever going to find it because
>> they'll have no way of even knowing to look for it. It needs to be
>> documented somewhere for this to be realistic.
> 
> What would be appropriate documentation for that? Isn't that what we
> have mailinglist archives for? What are the chances that we will need
> rpm/srpm and dpkg output ever again? Wouldn't is be just as easy to
> re-create them from scratch (we're only talking about 750 LOC here) if
> we really needed them and nobody remembered we used to have that?
> 
> We could of course switch back to CVS, so we could get an Attic
> directory. That would solve all our code removal problems.
> 
>> (And that of course applies to code previously removed too.)
> 
> So you're proposing I should document the mports:// source now that I
> have removed it, even though there have been no repositories providing
> the format required by mports:// in at least 5 years?
> 
> I wonder why when it comes to removing code that hasn't been used by
> anybody in _years_, suddenly lots of people see value in keeping it in a
> potential broken state rather than throwing it out to make MacPorts base
> a little cleaner.
> 
> Let me make this clear to you: macports1.0 (and especially
> macports1.0/macports.tcl) is a complete mess. If you don't want me to
> clean it up, I'll be happy to leave it alone and spend my time on
> something else.

I personally see no problem in culling unmaintained and unused code. If someone was willing to volunteer to maintain it, that would be one thing, otherwise I see little value in keeping it around. The mailing list, bug tracker, and SVN repository (including tags!) can be used to view What Used To Be.

-landonf