Re: removing devel/scons?

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

Thomas Klausner <wiz%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> I suggest removing devel/scons.
>
> It's the old major version 3 of the tool, using Python 2. We have
> scons4, which is the (nearly) current version of scons, using Python
> 3, in pkgsrc, and nothing in pkgsrc still needs devel/scons.

I have two objections to this framing:

  It's true that scons3 is old and uses python2.7.  scons has the bug
  that to configure a program to use a particular python version, you
  have to run scons under that version.  scons has been rapidly
  deprecating python 3 versions, so you can't even build for older 3.x
  with the current scons, except for gpsd which has special support to
  do that.  (This is a reason why nobody should use scons, but that's
  not the question here!).

  "Nothing in pkgsrc needs it" is the wrong test, even if it is a build
  tool.  I routinely use things in pkgsrc that are build tools outside
  of pkgsrc, usually to build the development branch from upstream VCS.
  Surely others do this too.

The right questions are

  Do we believe that there are effectively no users of this package?

  Do we believe that the costs of a package staying are greater than the
  value to the (small number of users)?

The cost of devel/scons is that it gets built in bulk builds.  I am not
aware of that causing any issues in years.  So the cost/benefit question
tilts hard to "are there any users at all".

There are 11 uses of scons in pkgsrc, and another 15 in wip.  Upstream
projects that seem to be maintained and used (at all, not just pkgsrc),
my guess:

  gpsd
  mongodb
  gitlab
  mapnik
  serf
  nsis
  py-thrift

All 26 projects in pkgsrc+wip are marked for scons 4.  That doesn't mean
"there is no use" of scons3 by anyone, but it's evidence about the
world.

Overall, my guess is that nobody is using scons 3 from pkgsrc for any
purpose, and it's ok to remove it.  Let's let the week finish to see if
anyone using it speaks up.

(You may have meant your comments as shorthand for this, but I think we
should explicitly center discussions around a belief that there are no
users, and not adopt "nobody uses build tools from pkgsrc outside
pkgsrc".)