librsvg, and what MacPorts is for

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

I am not sure what you are complaining about. Version  2.56.3, whilst not the absolute latest version a pretty up to date rust based version, is already used on Darwin 10 and newer. Your mail below seems to imply the old C version is used everywhere, which just isn't the case. What am I missing here ?

Chris

> On 10 Oct 2023, at 6:48 pm, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> 
> See the following thread: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/20744 — but to summarize, Mascguy does not want to update librsvg to a safe / modern one because ancient versions of MacOS can't support Rust.
> 
> So I don't want to be a pain in the neck, but I have little interest in MacPorts if the point is to preserve compatibility with MacOS 10.5 at the expense of having the thousands of users of current Macs and current MacOS have a dangerously insecure version of a basic SVG graphics library that other things depend on.
> 
> (The upstream librsvg maintainers have washed their hands of the old C version and don't support it any more, and for good reason. The Rust version of the library provides a far more secure codebase.)
> 
> I don't know how other people feel here, but I don't work on MacPorts because I like retrocomputing, but rather because I want to use Unix tools on my modern Macs.
> 
> If we're all on the same page that the priority is current MacOS users, then we need to make sure that policy is well understood by all and we need to update ports that are being held back for the benefit of people using an OS from 2007.
> 
> If the consensus is that we prioritize ancient versions of MacOS with three users (or sometimes none) over the experience the bulk of the users have, that's fine, and I'll accept it, but then I'm switching to Brew, and I will advise others to do the same, and will explain that current versions of MacPorts cannot be trusted to have safe software because the people involved prioritize support for ancient versions of the operating system.
> 
> I will accept whatever the consensus is.
> 
> Perry
> 
>