Support for ancient machines and operating systems

[Kirill A. Korinsky]

> On 8. Jan 2024, at 16:18, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> 
> On 1/8/24 10:12, Kirill A. Korinsky wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Keep in mind that some new commits often broke old OS as well.
>> 
>> For example upgrade Rust which can be seen like a disaster for old systems.
> So I think that the solution there is (again) that legacy is disciplined about not pulling in stuff that breaks it. David Gilman is right that a social problem isn't always best solved with technology, but I think in the present case, we have a great deal of flexibility thanks to technology.
> 
> The Portfile format is, ingeniously, a tcl script. By adding a small amount of fixes like allowing overlaying the main Portfile with a legacy Portfile etc., it may be possible to make the whole thing work quite cleanly without bothering "upstream" overly much.
> 
> It's unclear to me whether a repository consisting of "overlays" or a fork that pulls from upstream is the better mechanism, but that's a technical detail that can be hashed out.
> 

If by overlay you mean a dedicated repository which overlays existed Portfile for some port, it will be desister to maintain, isn't it?

and the way with fork soon will be adding to the end of each affected Portfile something like that:

> if (condition for old system) {
> some hacks here
> }

somewhere here I stop to understand why we need the fork to keep it?

To avoid tickets in track?

--
wbr, Kirill

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