Policy on `obsolete` ports...

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 19, 2021, at 17:02, Dave Allured wrote:

> Perry, you said "remove".  I would like to have obsolete ports moved to an inactive permanent reference archive, preferably somewhere in the ports code base, rather than permanently removed.  This would mainly be for possible resurrection at any time in the future.

What you're proposing here is a complete departure from how we've handled obsolete ports in the past. I don't believe Perry was attempting to open new discussion about changing how we handle obsolete ports; I think he was trying to codify our existing handling of obsolete ports.

Keeping obsolete ports around forever to facilitate resurrection is unnecessary; any deleted file can be resurrected at any time from the git history.

Keeping obsolete ports around forever to facilitate discovery by users is potentially useful to users who may hear about a port from e.g. another web site but the port has since been deleted or renamed. On the other hand, it could clutter up other users' search results with ports that no longer exist, which could frustrate those users.

On the other hand, obsolete ports do remain forever (until replaced by a new port of that name) in the https://ports.macports.org web site. (That web site is fairly recent, so ports deleted many years ago do not appear there.)