a no-homepage homepage for ports with dead homepages

[Jan Stary]

s/manpage/homepage/g of course; sorry.

Jan

On Jan 11 22:22:10, hans at stare.cz wrote:
> On Jan 11 11:49:40, ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > On 2018-01-11, at 9:37 AM, Ken Cunningham wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > 
> > > But if I can find a saved one at archive.org, that would be better, to be sure.
> > > 
> > > K
> > 
> > I've been prospecting MacPorts errors reported by repology <https://repology.org/maintainer/nomaintainer%40macports.org/problems>. A common error is that the homepage 404s out.
> > 
> > Many of these ports still work install correctly, but have no homepage, no homepage can seem to be found, and there is none on archive.org.
> > 
> > Rather than just have it error out forever, I made this page in the spirit of the gentoo page:
> > 
> > <https://trac.macports.org/wiki/NoHomePage>
> > 
> > 
> > If that is acceptable, I'd like to use it, or some variation of it, for ports like biggersql, for example, to fix some of these errors.
> 
> What errors exactly will be "fixed" by that?
> 
> > PS : Personally, I think asking users for a new homepage, if there is one, is better than just deleting the homepage variable requirement in Portfiles.
> 
> It might be useful to display a message when a port without a manpage is
> installed, saying something like you put on the page above, but shorter:
> 
> 	$port does not have a manpage.
> 	Please let $maintainer know if you know where it is.
> 
> (But note that all the ports listed on that repology page have no maintainer.
> And honestly, how many times has it happened in the past that a user came up
> with "hey, this homepage you thought was dead is actually here now"?)
> 
> At any rate, this would imho be better displayed automaticaly with 
> "port notes" - not explicitly in Portfile of course, but implicitly
> for ports without a manpage. Meaning they don't have one in the Portfile,
> as opposed to "it has this 'homepage', but it's not really its homepage".
> 
> 
> 	Jan
>