On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Michal Pasternak wrote:
> > devel/imake	ports@FreeBSD.org	2004-03-09
> 
> 	- imake? Well, I suppose they have reasons :) I still find 
> 	  it useful.

The proposal is to remove imake but leave "imake-4".  The imake
port itself is some kind of antiquated version no longer used by
any XFree86-related port.

> So, they are removing these ports not because they are obsolete,
> but they don't seem to have enough manpower to fix them (or, we
> can treat Kris' e-mail as a cry for help).

I helped create the Makevar called "DEPRECATED" to hold an
explanation of why each port is proposed for removal.  Although
I don't know the reason for each of them, by browsing the Makefiles
on FreeBSD's cvsweb interface, you could quickly find out.  But
the reason is that they are either abandoned by the author, or
have failed to build and/or install on FreeBSD for quite some time.

As for not enough manpower, well, that's true :-)

> I don't think this is even reasonable. Creating a HTML page with
> "this port needs your help" list would be much better, than just
> blindly remove them.

Well, with 317 ports marked "BROKEN" on i386, out of 361 that fail
to build from source, a static list is no good.  Interested persons
may wish to take a look at FreeBSD's dynamic list which is now up
at http://portsmon.firepipe.net.  This is also my own work.  This
includes lists of ports build errors, Problem Reports, and other
items, either by portname or PR number.  There is even a report
for the ports marked DEPRECATED, so you can click on links to
investigate each port's status from that page.

We've been kind of busy over on that side of the BSD effort,
recently :-)

mcl