I was just wondering if the current policy regarding the deprecation of EOLed ports isn't causing more harm than good (for example this whole situation with python2.7). For users, we see ports disappearing from one day to the next, and even when we see the deprecation notice in time, we have the additional pressure of having to keep up with that too.
If something works for me, why should I be forced to fix it something that wasn't broke? FreeBSD is an operating system for professionals so we should probably assume that someone deciding to use an EOL software knows what they are doing. Now we need to spend time lobbying upstream to convince them to update rapidly enough, or find workarounds.
While we could instead have continued to capitalize on the initial investment made by the community to port the software. Because I feel that this policy also hurts port maintainers, as they have to spend time updating a port that is otherwise working fine.
Why not let users and port maintainers decide the pace at which they want to upgrade the various dependencies of their ports? Especially since in FreeBSD there is a separation between base and userland so the versions used in the userland do not directly affect the security of the base system (especially since production services are most of the time jailed). I feel FreeBSD should be the OS being the most accommodating for old stable software.
What are your thoughts on this? Personally I feel that the policy should be that when a port is EOLed upstream, the FreeBSD team should instead copy all the source code on FreeBSD servers to ensure that the source code remains available so that ports continue working without disruption. Working ports should be eternal, except if they use an API of the FreeBSD kernel that has been removed.
If something works for me, why should I be forced to fix it something that wasn't broke? FreeBSD is an operating system for professionals so we should probably assume that someone deciding to use an EOL software knows what they are doing. Now we need to spend time lobbying upstream to convince them to update rapidly enough, or find workarounds.
While we could instead have continued to capitalize on the initial investment made by the community to port the software. Because I feel that this policy also hurts port maintainers, as they have to spend time updating a port that is otherwise working fine.
Why not let users and port maintainers decide the pace at which they want to upgrade the various dependencies of their ports? Especially since in FreeBSD there is a separation between base and userland so the versions used in the userland do not directly affect the security of the base system (especially since production services are most of the time jailed). I feel FreeBSD should be the OS being the most accommodating for old stable software.
What are your thoughts on this? Personally I feel that the policy should be that when a port is EOLed upstream, the FreeBSD team should instead copy all the source code on FreeBSD servers to ensure that the source code remains available so that ports continue working without disruption. Working ports should be eternal, except if they use an API of the FreeBSD kernel that has been removed.