What's our audience - and how do we serve them best

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 5, 2021, at 20:42, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:

> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> On Apr 5, 2021, at 17:16, Bjarne D Mathiesen wrote:
>>> 
>>> 1) what's our audience :
>>>  ? newbies
>>>  ? experienced
>>>  ? nerds
>>>  ? linux refugees
>>>  each of these needs different kinds of handholding
>>> 
>>> There's also a tendency to just abandon problems and wait for upstream
>>> to fix them instead of finding (temporary) workarounds. Try looking for
>>> "php80-imagick" in the threads.
>> 
>> The php imagick module is not compatible with php 8 or later. It is not our job to make it so. Other than MacPorts base and supporting software, we do not develop the software. We provide software that has been developed by others and what the other developers choose to support or not is out of our control.
>> 
>> Anyone is welcome to contribute e.g. to the upstream php imagick project to make it php 8+ compatible. When that happens, we'll update to the new version of MacPorts.
> 
> I fully understand that macports as such doesn't have the job of fixing
> this situation upstream - and that's also not what I'm asking for /
> proposing. I'm proposing something like when a port is deprecated so one
> gets a note about the situation.

MacPorts does have a "deprecated" portgroup which portfile authors can include into their ports to indicate various states of unsupportedness.


> We are back to who the audience is :
> 
> If it's "nerds" -or- "linux refugees" all is good and well - they are
> able to find the fix/workaround on their own (as I did).
> 
> But if we want to cater to newbies,

Certainly I would like to cater to everyone.


> we'll (IMHO) have to provide some
> way to tell them :
> - why isn't php80-imagick available
> - what's the (possible) workaround

I'm not sure what you're proposing we do. The reason why any port doesn't exist is that is hasn't been or cannot be created. The workaround is to create and submit the port yourself, or see if someone has already submitted it in a PR or ticket, or use a different port, or use software outside of MacPorts, or figure out why the port can't be created and work toward fixing that.


> And php80-imagick is only used as an example here.

Certainly. If you have other examples I can try to respond to those as well. But I'm not sure what general purpose answer you're expecting to receive.