a no-homepage homepage for ports with dead homepages

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-01-11 22:22, Jan Stary wrote:
> On Jan 11 11:49:40, ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com wrote:
>> 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>

I like the idea of the placeholder wiki page with a detailed explanation.

>> 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?

It documents that the upstream homepage is gone for good. That helps to
understand this software is most likely a dead project.

Nit pick: I would have called it NoHomepage (small letter p), as the
compound form seems to be more common than two words and it is used this
way as Portfile option and in the wiki page itself.

>> 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.

This could add a lot of clutter, for example if a port is only installed
as a dependency. I think the port notes should only contain information
relevant to its usage.

> 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".

We could use the above wiki page URL as the default value for the
homepage option, so not setting anything in the Portfile would use that.

Rainer