Deprecating support for ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 23, 2019, at 16:42, Adam Mercer wrote:

> I work as part of the LIGO project and for a while now we've used
> MacPorts to provide support for our collaboration members running our
> software under macOS. For various reasons we are in the process of
> switching over to Conda as this allows us to support Linux, macOS, and
> even Windows (in some circumstances) from the same package source
> thereby reducing the amount of work needed to support all the
> different platforms used.
> 
> As such we would like to indicate that the ports we have in MacPorts
> are no longer supported by us, looking through the various PortGroups
> it seems that the deprecated group allows us to specify that a Port is
> no longer under support in MacPorts. Therefore would the correct
> course of action here be to add the following to the Ports we wish to
> mark as no longer supported:
> 
> PortGroup deprecated 1.0
> deprecated.macports_support no
> 
> In addition to setting the maintainer to nomaintainer?
> 
> At the moment all the ports work but that may not the be case as time
> goes on, so eventually these will probably need to be removed. However
> as they are still currently working I'd like to keep them around in
> case anyone else would like to maintain them.
> 
> Any comments or suggestions regarding this?

I'm not familiar with Conda, but assuming the LIGO software still exists, and especially if it is still being developed, I don't see why it can't remain in MacPorts, even if the developers don't themselves maintain or support the MacPorts version. Most developers aren't involved in the fact that their software is in MacPorts so we don't have a specific way to indicate the presence or absence of developer support.

If you no longer wish to maintain the ports, you can remove yourself as maintainer and maybe someone else will pick them up.

I'm not familiar with the deprecated 1.0 portgroup but the comments at the top of it say:

> # This PortGroup is used to indicate that a port is deprecated.
> # Usage of this PortGroup does not necessarily mean that the port is about to be removed, but its usage is discouraged.
> # Some possible reasons for deprecation:
> #     * the port no longer builds on recent versions of macOS and/or Xcode
> #     * the project is no longer maintained upstream
> #     * the port is severely out of date, and maintaining it has become a burden no-one wants to take on

So it does not sound like that applies to LIGO at this time.