Support for ancient machines and operating systems

[Perry E. Metzger]

On 1/8/24 09:53, Kirill A. Korinsky wrote:
>> On 8. Jan 2024, at 15:50, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to float the idea that we create a fork of the MacPorts repository that is devoted to operating systems and hardware that is more than (say) a decade old, and that we allow the people who are interested in maintaining that software to freely work on it. It doesn't hurt the rest of us after all, and it absolves us of the need to keep the main MacPorts repository complicated by patches to support very old systems.
>>
>>
>> How do you see the way to backport changes from upstream MacPorts to legacy MacPorts?
>>
>> at some point automatical merge would be broken on conflicts, and I assume quite fast.

I don't think there should be overly much in the way of trouble if 
legacy reasonably disciplined about frequently applying commits from 
upstream to legacy. If it's done often, then one doesn't risk falling 
far behind and having a giant mess to clean up. Someone would probably 
want to write something to semi-automate it based on a CI for legacy 
systems. Such work would be beyond the scope of the main project of 
course, but it would also make life easier for the people interested in 
legacy. It might even be possible to create some override mechanisms to 
parse in / "#include" a "legacy" portfile in with the upstream 
maintained portfile to reduce file diffs in legacy.


Perry