Re: removal proposal: net/youtube-dl

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Leonardo Taccari <leot%NetBSD.org@localhost> writes:

> Hello Greg,
>
> Greg Troxel writes:
>> I see that youtube-dl uses a distfile from 2021.12.17.  yt-dlp is the
>> apparent (sole or at least main) successor fork, with a release/distfile
>> that's less than 30 days old.
>>
>> I'm not super clear on the details, but my impression is that youtube-dl
>> from 2021 is extremely unlikely to do anything useful in 2026.
>>
>> I therefore suggest that there are zero users of youtube-dl and that it
>> should be deleted.  I'll delete no earlier than 7/11 12Z unless there
>> are objections.
>
> yt-dlp is a fork of youtube-dl that's probably more maintened nowdays.

Yes.  I would say that yt-dlp is unquestionably maintained, and
youtube-dl is solidly unmaintained.

  Last release of yt-dlp: 2026-06-09
  Last release of youtube-dl: 2021-12-17

> However, I would not be that sure it can not do something useful in
> 2026. youtube-dl (like yt-dlp) has a lot of extractors and not all of
> the web sites it supports are like YouTube that change often.

That's a good point.

> Anyway, I think that yt-dlp likely could supersedes youtube-dl so if
> noone speak up it's fine for me that it is removed.

That is my belief as well, that anything desired from youtube-dl would
have made its way to yt-dlp by now.

I also believe that these continuation forks are the modern version of
the project, and it's an artifact of governance that they are forks
rather than just new upstream maintainers.

Thanks for replying and we'll see if anyone else speaks up -- I try to
announce and wait a week to avoid hasty deletions.