apg still very useful, please don't deprecate

[Joshua Root]

Sure, I understand your position. It's always inconvenient and costly
(to your time at the least) when software you rely on goes away. The
good news is, that's not happening to apg now, and may not happen any
time in the near future.

But the unfortunate reality is that without maintainers, software
eventually becomes incompatible with its changing environment. I think
the deprecation message has done its job in alerting you in advance to
the fact that, due to the lack of an upstream project, there is a higher
than average chance of that happening to apg at some point. Better to
know now than to be taken by surprise when it happens.

- Josh

On 2020-8-17 10:43 , Sean DALY wrote:
> Hi Josh,
> 
> Alas, I lack the skill set to maintain software myself, and I also have
> time constraints.
> 
> I will look into these alternatives, but a cursory evaluation indicates
> that makepasswd lacks phonetic pronounceability, mkpwd provides it but
> without sufficient mixing of random characters, passogva is old and
> possibly not maintained upstream, pwgen provides secure pronounceability
> possibly at apg's level, secpwgen may also suffice, and sf-pwgen seems
> to offer either pronounceability or randomness but not both like apg.
> 
> One alternative would be to generate a couple of thousand passwords with
> apg, store them in an encrypted container, and draw from there when I
> need one for inspiration (I never use a generated password verbatim). I
> also keep an older Mac around offline to run deprecated software which
> is still useful. What I like about apg today is I have it in any of my
> terminals when I need it.
> 
> thanks
> 
> Sean
> 
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 9:35 AM Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org
> <mailto:jmr at macports.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Sean DALY wrote:
>     > So if it is possible to keep apg around, please do, I use it all
>     the time
>     > and it performs its job very well with no bugs I have ever encountered
> 
>     The danger is not that it will be removed just for being old, but that
>     it will one day start failing to build with the latest developer tools
>     (or the latest version of cracklib). Then someone will look at it, see
>     that there is no upstream maintainer, and wonder if it's worth debugging
>     the problem and then maintaining a patch set forever.
> 
>     The best way to prevent a port from being removed in those circumstances
>     is to volunteer to do that repair and maintenance work on it.
> 
>     Do note that there are several other password generation utilities
>     available through MacPorts; maybe one of them would serve your purposes.
>     The ones I found with a quick search are: makepasswd, mkpwd, passogva,
>     pwgen, secpwgen, sf-pwgen
> 
>     - Josh
>