YouTube-DL is no more

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 18, 2020, at 14:28, Clemens Lang wrote:

>> 2. Next time(?) I update MP I presume YouTube-dl won’t update. Will it
>> be removed? Will it no longer work? Is there a way to keep the port I
>> have currently functioning?
> 
> MacPorts mirrors the upstream files, so even if youtube-dl were removed
> from GitHub, the port would continue to work.

Even if we were to remove a port from MacPorts, if you had installed it, you would continue to have it installed until you decide to uninstall it, either explicitly with `sudo port uninstall youtube-dl` or by running cleanup operations like `sudo port reclaim`. But what Clemens said is true: software bitrots over time, so even if a port works today, especially a port that communicates with services over the network, that doesn't guarantee that it will work tomorrow. Similarly, software that works with today's version of macOS and the versions of the libraries it depends on that are in MacPorts today, that doesn't guarantee that an update to the OS or Xcode or the libraries it needs won't break it in the future.

> Additionally, the
> youtube-dl source code was always available from youtube-dl.org, so even
> if the GitHub repository would not have been restored, we would just
> have switched the port to use that source instead.

At the time that the DMCA takedown request was issued, the youtube-dl web site was hosted on GitHub Pages, so it got taken down as well, and the source code was only hosted on GitHub Releases, so it was not available there either, though it continued to be available from the MacPorts distfile mirrors. They then moved to a different web host to restore the web site and added the source code download to the web site. During that time, the youtube-dl port was switched to download from that web site. Now that the GitHub repo has been restored, the port has switched back to downloading from GitHub.

Our ticket tracking the situation was https://trac.macports.org/ticket/61369